“Why does it feel like I’m playing life in Hard Mode?” my son asked recently.

Same, I thought. But I think I know the answer.

He and I were conceived inside depressed mothers. Thanks to being stuck in an abusive marriage, I cried every day while pregnant with him. My mother, deeply disappointed by her affection-free life, was similarly miserable while pregnant with me, and tried to abort me by drinking neat gin.

Being bathed for nine months in your mother’s tears does something to a person. One of the things it does is hardwire your brain for ADHD (receipts here1). Nature is nothing if not adaptive: if you’re born to a mother who’s ambivalent about your existence, it’s helpful to have your circuitry wired for survival. Hyper-distractibility is a form of hyper-vigilance; constantly scanning your environment for opportunity or threat. The flip-side, hyperfocus? When you might have to fend for yourself, you’re going to need it. Can’t be lackadaisical chasing your next meal — the deer in the jungle2 — when you might, at any moment, be abandoned like Mowgli.

So let’s say I had a substrate, different from my siblings, on which the rest of my experiences were built. A heightened sensitivity to rejection and a lot of first-hand experience of it, due to all the reasons that ADHD kids are annoying: impulsive, chaotic, messy, tuning out when people are speaking, forgetting stuff and leaving things half done, and the key one, no filter — speaking your mind, directly, unaware of how your words will land.

I would have done better — a whole lot better — if I’d ever felt loved as a child. But love was for other people. I was clearly faulty. That was the baseline. Then, when I was eight, Wavy Line Cornflakes moved in.

This was not my nickname for our stepfather, but Wavy Line cornflakes were the result, after a fashion. Living with him ushered in a regime that I came to call Food Apartheid (I was a child of the seventies; apartheid was on the news every night, and it was the only word I had for a system where one group ate well and the other didn't). The adults had good food. We had cheap food. My stepfather had Kellogg’s cornflakes. We had ‘Wavy Line’ (the cheapest brand from the Spar).3 My stepfather had Kerrygold butter. We had one-litre tubs of cooking margarine from the Cash n’ Carry that smelled like engine oil. My stepfather had gold-top milk (creamy). We had silver top.

And so it went on. We had bread and jam for tea most nights of the week for ten years; he and my mother, separately, ate quality food (steak, salmon and veg) a little later. The only time we had better food (though mostly, it was still bread and jam) was on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when my stepsisters came to tea.

I’ll be clear: this was done to all four of us, and the three of us who survived our childhoods came through with various dents in our psyches. I can’t speak for the others, but in my case, the malware installed in the vulnerable operating system of my ADHD, the chief ‘dent,’ was severely sub-optimal self-esteem.

I knew this was a weakness, so I daren’t let anyone know. I faked self-esteem (and was called ‘aloof’). I faked self-belief (and was called ‘arrogant’). Fully believing I was born to be a writer of note, I wrote a poem every day for five years, from the age of 13. I hyper-focused my way into prizes and accolades. Built a tremendous carapace of ‘worth’ around myself, constructed of achievements: Grade A exams, a first-class honours degree in science, and a high-paying programming job at which I excelled. ‘Look at me! I have value!’ was the game.

But beneath it, the whisper that any good predator could sense. The ‘sorries’ that fell out of my mouth like confetti. The ‘bad childhood’ stories I told for entertainment when drunk. Predatory men love a trophy-type woman who’s been told for many years she’s both too much and not enough. And pretty soon, I was in the hands of an expert manipulator, who insisted, when he abused me, that my tears were manipulating him.

Many years have passed since my escape and recovery. And nineteen next month since I started clearing the effects of emotional abuse using EFT tapping. Yet still, despite enormous progress, there’s this niggling doubt about my own worth that began in the womb and was set in the concrete of resentfully digested Wavy Line cornflakes. No one would know it’s there because I’m still an ace at faking full brilliance, still terrified people will see the carapace cracks. My armour of achievements is considerable now: an award-winning novel, newspaper bylines, poetry on the syllabus, and for ten years a senior post at the UK’s top creative university.

But Life has decided it’s time I take the carapace off. It has done that by removing me from my much loved and financially secure job, and shredding everyone’s brain with short-form reels, which smashed up book sales, and along with AI, has turned the world into a place where the skills I’ve spent a lifetime developing are no longer required (content warning if you write literary fiction, don’t read this, it will ruin your week).

Layer by layer, the things I have used to persuade myself I have value have been removed. They’re all history now, and sometimes it feels like the world is telling me, so am I.

As I once again ‘pivot’ (how many times? when will it end?), seeking ways to raise my profile and shore up my income, I'm once again thrown into facing the confidence gap I’ve lived with for decades. Naturally, I’ve been using EFT tapping to dig out its roots. And what did I find, yet again, but ten years at that table.

This statement had a real emotional kick:

Even though I learned at the dinner table that the good things go to other people, not me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

You know what kills me with this one? I’ve proved it false over and over again. Good things have come to me many, many times. I’m surrounded by the palpable results of all those good things. But childhood malware doesn’t care about facts.

You deleted it before, and thought you got it all, but it replicated itself, as good viruses do, and lay dormant, deep in your operating system. It only takes you opening a crisis file (redundancy, or a book that dies on submission) for the thing to reboot and start running in the background again. So quiet, you don’t even notice. You’re just wondering why it’s so hard to get your arse to the desk.

Delete, delete, delete.

This belief was created by a fucked up man and a woman on a budget. Two people who were kids in the middle of a war where bombs were literally falling on their houses, so we — in their eyes — were blessed beyond belief. He was insecure because he’d had so little as a kid, so he guarded his wealth like Smaug the dragon on his hoard of gold; he refused to support another man’s kids. Mum had her finances totally separate, feeding and clothing her kids on a very tight budget. That was the reason for the system that wreaked so much psychological havoc on me. It was all down to money. And if only I’d known at the time, and not had to work it out for myself; the realisation didn’t land until after her death, when I was 38.

This is why I believe in complete openness with children. Why being open with them is a cardinal rule. When they were small, if I lost my temper, I’d apologise as soon as I was calm, and explain what stressed me, and that it wasn’t their fault. When I had to say no to three fancy ice creams, I explained that I only had a ten pound note left for the week, and that was their dinner money. So none of them went into the world believing, as far as I know, that they were worth less than other people. Amazing how much less damage you do when you don’t keep secrets.

Life, I guess you’re right. It makes no sense, as a person who is open in principle, to keep this damn carapace on.

In a couple of weeks, for paid subscribers, I'll share the full tapping sequence I'm using to dig this one out — set-up statements and all.

or if you’d rather,

Join our community read of Why I Stole Your Life, the epic 18th-century adventure of the real-life soldier and pirate Mary Read

Mary Read’s half-brother, Mark, is missing. With their mother on a mission to extract money from Mark’s grandmother, the wealthy widow Mrs Read, Mary and her Ma set off for London, with Mary disguised as a boy.

Join the story, or catch up, with these chapters:

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You Will Learn Nothing Good From Mister Dryden

I am not the only one not going by their name. Charles, the negro servant, corrects me the very first time we are alone. I have a question about the gloves but have no sooner begun with ‘Charles,’ then he stops me with a finger.

‘My name is not Charles,’ he says. ‘My name is Adisa.’

I might say my name is not Mark, to show him we are not so different, but if I told him my real name he would know we’re as different as cat and dog.

‘Adisa,’ he says again, as though my thinking was a kind of not listening.

I say it back to him, and though it is not a complicated name, I step over it uncertainly like an unlit path. He laughs.

‘Adisa,’ he repeats. ‘Remember it. Charles is my English name. Mrs Read gave it to me. There were two kings of that na…

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You! Yes you! Male person! Have you been called a simp, cuck or soyboy? You have?

Hello! It’s lovely to meet you. I’m a fan.

Let me congratulate you on avoiding the weapons-grade peer pressure of your late teens to consider all things deemed “girly” (including actual girls) inferior.

If you were raised in the 70s and 80s, perhaps it came easier: adverts showed girls in dungarees and normal (non-pink) Lego, male rockstars wore long hair, makeup and catsuits, and female ones shaved their heads, played guitar, and weren’t expected to perform in their underwear. Yes, sexism was rampant, but all the cool people knew in those couple of decades that no one’s value was decided by whether the flesh between their legs was an innie or an outie.

But if you were raised with an internet connection? You’ve done some hard swerving. You’ve avoided being poisoned by early incel forums on Reddit and 4Chan, and somehow avoided the dehumanising effects of the normalised hardcore that is internet porn.

Either way, cuck-a-luck, simp-ly fabulous chap, you held your ground, and continued to acknowledge/remember/know that women are people, not a lower caste created to serve the male of the species. Now — laden with the achievement medals of insulting nicknames from misinformed man-babies who can’t get laid, and are envious that you can — you’ve arrived in my words. This post is for you, and the women who appreciate you.

I want to illustrate how bad Gen Z women are having it right now. How very not-as-good-as-the-1980s, when we all marvelled at Melanie Griffith in Working Girl (1988) as she, with huge hair and genuine good-at-the-jobness, toppled her deceitful female boss, Sigourney Weaver.1 I was chatting to my daughter and her wife (22, 25) about the fact that three women attempted last year (sod the sisterhood) to topple me from a charity where I hold some sway. All three have now resigned or stepped back, and I mentioned that the coup failed largely because two men on the board hold me in high regard.

“They treat you like a man,” my daughter-in-law said.

I can’t tell you how much this shocked me.

“They treat me on my merits,” I said. “They treat me like a human being.”

But that, to my daughter-in-law, is being “treated like a man.”

I mean, fuck-a-duck. It is 2026. According to my childhood, we should all be wearing silver catsuits and living on the moon, or at least getting around on hoverboards. But instead abortion is being de-legalised, some men have stopped wiping their bumcracks,2 and being treated on your merits is being “treated like a man”?

Last week, I entertained you with the deeply shallow thoughts of Daniel Mancini. This week I’ve been inspired by the musings of another sad manosphere victim with a suitably masculine name, “Dave Atterman”. Atterman, Dave! Go get em!

Dave weighed in under a note by that rather summed up what is going on at the moment between men and women.

Jameela, known to many of us as Tahani from The Good Place, is currently recovering from the trauma induced by an attempted kidnapping.

This was coordinated, but not targeted. I just stumbled accidentally into the line of fire… where men take women and girls, for profit. Because we are not lives, stories and dreams. We are objects to be destroyed at the will of men.

…

After the attack, I was asked with frustration, why I had left my apartment alone at 6pm. SIX PM. As a 5 foot 10 inch forty year old, wearing outdoor winter layers… In a nice area, in a city I was reassured was safe.

Whether or not Dave knows this is irrelevant; Dave is one of those men who wants the kind of woman who doesn’t exist anymore. He possibly wouldn’t be averse to kidnapping a gorgeous woman to keep as a slave if he thought he could get away with it. Because when responded to Jameela’s Note by saying her husband, a feminist ally, had said, “It’s all men until it’s NO men,” he felt compelled to say,

“Your husband is a cuck without a back bone (sic). Take away sex from him and he’ll show you his true colours.”

For Dave, sex is transactional. Only if women provide this service to a man can they be expected to be treated with any decency. He’s sure that men who treat women as equals are only pretending, and that if you withdraw sexual favours, he’ll turn on you like a wild dog who hasn’t been fed. Because that’s what he’d do, and the man-boys he hangs out with online: because women are appliances, designed to serve men with sandwiches and sex, and if they break down, you’ve got every right to kick them.

The ‘cuck’ insult — derived from cuckold — is consistently applied, in the manosphere, to men who genuinely like women. Oh, there are plenty of men who say they like women when in fact they only like what women can provide. But the men who really like women: who have them as friends, who will treat them — as my colleagues above did, in the words of my daughter-in-law — no different from men? Oh, they’re ‘cucks’.

Sad sex-starved boys poisoned by manosphere content have come to believe that women actually want to be dominated; and that once we meet a ‘real man’, we’ll be seduced into unfaithfulness because (they believe) women are naturally hypergamous: we naturally mate “up”. It’s one of many myths in the massive flying carpet of myths on which manosphere influencers take these sad boys for a ride, minimising their chances of ever finding love. For that reason, they think, our non-dominating partners are just asking to be cuckolded; along will come this gym-maxxed, Porsche-owning bellend and we’ll abandon the literal gentlemen who love us for a “real man”.

The truth, of course, is that when you find someone who loves for yourself, you have no reason to look elsewhere. Most men are exhausting. Men who think they’re superior to you, and expect you to run around meeting their needs are especially exhausting. Why would we leave a man who actually sees us as human, is a functioning adult who does his share around the house, who doesn’t get defensive if we have an opinion?

The men they call ‘cucks’ and ‘simps’ are the men modern women want. The men who are secure enough in their masculinity to know it doesn’t rest in their six-pack or their bank balance. Secure enough not to feel threatened when women are intelligent, capable and strong. Who don’t feel insulted when we say men are dangerous (because they know the statistics); who don’t feel emasculated by a woman who can beat them at chess, or snooker, or karate.

All this cuck/simp garbage just exposes their massive insecurity that they would be cuckolded (if they could ever get a girlfriend) if they didn’t control her through their moods, their threats, their endless haranguing, and tracking her phone. When you consider how unattractive this makes them to a whole population of women waking up — in the wake of Epstein, Pelicot, Andrew Tate, the Hampshire rape verdict, and much more besides — to the truth of how many see them, you have to wonder if it’s all a clever ruse by the Influencer class to take out the competition.

As puts it in “The Fuck Men Frenzy on Social”:

Whether men fully grasp it yet or not, the terms of straight marital partnership appear to be changing in real time as younger women grow increasingly unwilling to organize their lives around chronic male underfunctioning, emotional asymmetry, and the endless labor of relational management.

So, simps, cucks and soyboys — the last, I guess, eschewing the “manly” activity of slaughtering animals for food — I salute you. You’ve got the winning game, and it’s your sons and daughters who will inherit the earth. You are the Gold Standard of men.

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Paid peeps! We are getting together for a coffee and chat on Tuesday, 3pm BST. Put in in your calendars and I’ll drop you a link 3 hours ahead with your novel instalment.

Now. Every time I post a chapter of my fun-as-heck feminist pirate novel, a bunch of free subscribers dissolve into the ether. No one likes an inbox bombardment, not everyone reads fiction, I get it, so! I’ve stopped mailing Why I Stole Your Life to free subscribers. You can still read the latest chapter at this link (and I’ll include one in each Friday post), but I’m giving your inboxes some space before they take out a restraining order.

Paid subscribers, you will still get it every Tuesday BECAUSE YOU LOVE ME, yes? You have dug into your pockets to prove it, and believe me, your love is requited, and if you were in the vicinity, you would get a hug and a platonic smoochie 😍😘❤️ .

Also, if you missed this extra, and you’re in physical pain at the moment: ‘hAvE yOU tRieD noT bEing iN phYsicAl pAIn?’ Honestly, this works; it’s a paid subscriber perk. Carve out 40 minutes from your day and enjoy:

Until next week, my lovelies. Keep your shiny, perfectly wonderful peckers up! The world is in flux, but we are the world’s flux capacitors.

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Plenty of pain is structural. You break your leg, it’s going to hurt. However, there is always an emotional component to pain, which heightens with any negative story you tell about it: you fear what it means, you’re afraid of the pain itself, or you’re angry with yourself for not looking after yourself.

And some pain has a purely emotional cause: stress leading to tense muscles in your back and neck in a chronic manner, for example, can eventually lead to chronic pain in those areas, or create structural issues like slipped disks and arthritis.

Pain is an electrical signal, and we can reduce it. We just need to find a way to have the pain conversation with our body. And EFT tapping, I’ve found, is an easy way to do that. …

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Impostors Run in the Family

London seems the finest place in the world. The road, having hardened, begins to clatter beneath the wheels, signalling that the great city has begun. From the top of the coach, where we sit as outsides (at half the price of insides) we can admire to my side a great park full of deer, and to Ma’s, handsome palaces set back from the road. All the noblemen and noblewomen have town dwellings as well as country ones, the coach driver explains, and they are gathered together here, each showing off with grand entrances and ornamental frontages how very favoured they are. Brother, you would laugh the scorn off your boot laces to see the nonsense they get up to with their lions on gateposts and their fancy curlicue railings. Then the deer park gives way to more fine houses, closer to the carriageway but still very grand and tall. From these first impressions, I imagine we are going to live in the highest manner. We turn into another fine road but soon it gives way, as high morals give way to corruption, to something of a meaner character, and soon I am convinced this is a devilish kind of place, somewhere so far from the sea that nothing fresh or fully alive can dwell in it. There are beggars by the side of the road with all kinds of hideous deformities, and elderly vegetables on the market stalls, and fish that have been dead for so long that they are blind and half-stinking. Though even their death-stink can hardly compete with the stench of human dung from open gutters. I see a woman hitch up her skirts and relieve herself in by the side of the road in broad daylight. Though she is wobbling, so might be drunk. Everybody seems to be drunk. It is only mid-afternoon as we are arriving, but I have never seen so many drunken people all in one place, and I very quickly surmise it is because one will need to be drunk all the time to live in a place as foul as London.

Then it grows finer again. Then more foul. Loud men and sharp women and grubby children, and gentlemen on horseback, and traders with their goods carts, and dray horses pulling beer in all directions, as though the place is made entirely of public houses. A man making music out of a contraption strung around his neck and another man juggling for money. Then clothes grow smarter and the buildings straighter, and huge domed cathedral rises out of the city’s stone heart. And all around it, trading and hawking and market stalls. This is a city that will not make up its mind, and I have no sense of where I might belong in it.

When we are finally disgorged from the coach, Ma tells me we are headed for Mrs Read’s house in Hatton Street. Mrs Read’s house is not like the houses I am used to, and I am not to touch anything, and I am not gawp at anything, and I am not to speak unless spoken to, and I am not to answer to any name except yours. Ma spittles my cheek with her handkerchief to unsmudge it, though her handkerchief is surely fouler than my face.

She pulls on the bell cord.

The door swings wide, answered by a negro servant wearing a dress coat and white gloves. He stares at us and I stare right back. Ma makes her spine stiff and explains she is Mrs Margret Read, come to see Mrs Ada Read about her grandson Mark. How she can call herself Mrs I do not know. I suppose it is in the same spirit that she is calling me Mark. Mrs is only for wealthy and respectable ladies and we both know she is a Goodwife if she is anything, and in truth not even that. The negro allows us in and tells us to wait in the hall, which is a room bigger than our whole downstairs room and with its own fireplace too. I marvel at the walls, which are made of carved wooden panels. It is not quite as grand as Lady Upton’s house, but I find it hard to believe that our mother married a man of such class and means. Our mother bends down towards my ear and whispers with considerable force,

‘This is a fine house, Mark, is it not? Your father grew up here.’

She has been preparing for days, but for me, it is very itchy to wear your name. Before I can object that no one is listening, the servant returns to usher us into the parlour.

Mrs Read is a tiny bird lady sitting on a velvet seat in a nest of cushions. Every cushion is embroidered with a flower, either purple or orange. The kind that grew in the vicarage garden, crocuses. Because of the cushions, her feet are not touching the floor, and sway a little as though blown by the breeze coming in at the window. A fierce face, and though this is your grandmother, I recognise nothing of you in it. There is much more of you in the handsome fellow painted in his waistcoat who hangs above the mantlepiece. Mrs Read purses her lips together as if she has nothing to say to us, but she sees that our mother is about to speak and determines to be first. Her voice seems to come from very far away, as though it is the voice of a person she has swallowed.

‘Margret. What a surprise to see you. You might have sent a message.’

Ma cannot write, as Mrs Read must surely know.

‘It has been a long time,’ our mother agrees.

‘Many years,’ says Mrs Read. ‘Many years. And this is young Mark? The last time I saw him, he was only a babe in arms.’

‘This is he,’ says Ma.

‘Let me look at you boy,’ says Mrs Read, and beckons me towards her until, seeing my shoes about to reach the colourful carpet in front of her, cries ‘Stop! Never on the Turkish. We go round. Stay there. I can see you well enough.’

From the twitch in her nostrils, I think she can smell me, too. She leans back a little.

‘He’s a sorry state, Margret, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘It has been a long time since your son sent any money,’ Ma says.

‘It has been a long time since he sent anyone anything,’ says Mrs Read.

Ma nods. If they thought him drowned, neither woman will say it. As I later discover, their tight lips on this matter conceal quite different conclusions. Ma thinks everyone dead at the smallest opportunity. But Mrs Read will not believe the sea has swallowed her son until it coughs up bones.

‘As a consequence,’ says Ma, trying to pick her way past the silence, ‘we have fallen on hard times.’

‘Clearly,’ says Mrs Read. ‘And now you have come to see if I might soften those times, is that it?’

Ma casts her eyes down to the floor. ‘Not for me,’ she says. ‘But for your grandson. For the boy.’

Mrs Read tinkles a little bell that is sitting on the circular table at her elbow, and the negro servant appears.

‘Charles,’ she said, ‘would you bring us some tea? And some lemonade for the boy? Do sit down,’ she says to our mother, pointing towards a nervy-looking chair. And to me, ‘You’d better stand.’ I must be grubbier than I imagined. ‘Have you ever tasted lemonade?’ she asks me.

‘No, Ma’am,’ I answer, and she seems pleased to be addressed so. It came out of my mouth without thinking, because of how she reminds me of Lady Upton: her chest puffed up, and lace upon it, and servants to do her bidding.

‘It’s quite the sensation in London now,’ she says. ‘Made of lemons and sugar. You’ve had sugar?’

‘Yes, once.’ Only remembering as I say it that I stole a dab of it at the big house. But Ma is already speaking over me.

‘We’ve not had many luxuries since my husband went to sea. Mark was only a baby then.’

There is a glare in our mother, as though it is Mrs Read’s fault that he went to sea, and not her fault at all for marrying a sea captain, who would likely do such a thing. She carries on, her arm towards me as though she is a market trader come to sell a troublesome colt.

‘He is ever so thin, as you see, but he is a good boy, and he does not deserve to suffer when there is —’ she gazes mock-absently about the room, its drapes and hangings, its not-to-be-trodden-on carpet, its painting over the mantelpiece — ‘when there is the means to mend it.’

Mrs Read looks as though she is going to puff her feathers up, but then some thought deflates her, and she becomes tinier again. It is me she is looking at. Perhaps she imagines she sees something of her son in me, though there is not so much as the smallest scrap of Captain Read in my body.

‘It’s true,’ she says, ‘that my son would not want to see his own flesh and blood in such a sorry state. I can offer —’

Charles returns with a tray of tea things: an ornate silver pot, two bone china cups on saucers, a tiny sieve sitting on a tiny bowl, and a cloudy glass of what can only be my lemonade. With his precise white-gloved hands, Charles sets the tea things on the round table, next to the bell. He balances the tiny sieve over a cup, and pours the tea through it, catching a miniature slurry of dead leaves. A splash of tea hits his gloved fingers, and I wonder if he wears the gloves to protect his hands from tea, or to protect the tea from his hands. I feel sure he would not wear gloves at all, except that Mrs Read makes him. When he has gone, she stirs one lump of sugar into her tea, and continues where she left off.

‘I can offer to take the child in.’

I take a sip of the lemonade. It is nice and nasty all at once.

‘That is very kind of you,’ says to Ma, ‘but I could not be without the child.’ She puts several lumps of sugar into her cup, and from Mrs Read’s face, more than I believe is polite. Mrs Read speaks as if our mother hasn’t.

‘I will look after him and raise him as my own. Breed him up to be of good standing. He will want for nothing.’

This sounds good to me. Knowing how Ma despises me, I cannot think that she would say no.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It would break my heart to part with the child.’ I think this very well done. Her cup almost trembles on its saucer.

Mrs Read considers her. Considers me.

‘You would be welcome to visit him from time to time.’

‘Excuse me for appearing ungracious,’ our mother replies, seeming anything but. ‘The child is all I have left of my husband.’

Mrs Read to consider this statement, with spaces between those sips. Eventually she says,

‘You might visit him once a week. Would that be tolerable to you?’

‘It would be tolerable to me,’ I say, and Ma glares at me before turning to the older woman.

‘Mrs Read, we are speaking of my only child.’

‘And my only grandchild. I would like to be better acquainted.’

‘I might bring the child to you once a week.’

Negotiations continue in this manner for long enough for the tea to be drunk to its dregs. It is finally agreed that Mrs Read will provide a crown a week for my maintenance, and in return I will be brought to her every Wednesday, to be educated, and every Sunday to have dinner with her, Ma not to be present at either occasion. Our mother is given a crown in her hand as down-payment. We leave under a veil of politeness and gentility until the door is closed and we are halfway down the street and Ma cuffs me round the head.

‘I told you not to speak. You nearly cost me thirteen pounds a year! “It would be tolerable to me.” And I suppose you want me to starve while you live like a gentleman! Not that it would last long. The old woman is a fool, but not a complete fool. How long do you think you could deceive her, living under her roof? She would find you out, and then we would both be derelict!’

In the days that follow she says nothing more about the deception. We take lodgings not far from Mary-Bone. She refers to me as Mark and he and him in company, and Mark when we’re alone. The best lies, she says, are like the best dogs: kept both inside and out. Never again do I hear my name from her mouth.

prev chapter ——— next chapter

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Eek! Don’t make me open Threads! Don’t make me! Ah, no, there I go, and… oh, it’s okay, it’s just some inspiration for this week’s post, so I can label it ‘work’.

‘Work’ is not a negative word for me. As a freelancer prone to just sliding into mmmmm, this late Spring sunshine looks delicious, it means useful productivity. Sometimes it also means I can pay for the month’s supply of cheese, or a corticosteroid injection into my glenohumeral joint to ease the pain I’ve developed from shouldering the world’s troubles (scheduled for Thursday, wish me all the luck and a decent local anaesthetic).

I spy with my both-long-and-short-sighted-astigmatic eye (screen time, screen time) a bunch of women being hilarious with words. This is what I love about men’s bad behaviour being so front-and-centre these days; the way it generates snort-your-coffee comedy.

We begin with trishaaaaa.95 (her screen name voiced by James Corden in Gavin & Stacey), saying

Here, curated for your delight, the best answers, with definitions (some by me, some by the wicked women of threads).1

Men-on-pause

(noun) A bodily response to the fetid contents of the dating pool. Hormonal shutdown provoked by the pervasive stench of misogyny, marking the end of reproductive desire.

Byesexual

(adj.) Being single for so long that you don’t even remember what it’s like to have romantic/sexual feelings.

DisappointMENt

(noun) The feeling of sadness, frustration, or dissatisfaction that occurs when a series of men fail to meet your hopes or expectations.

Nomosexual

(noun, dialect, Southern US) No mo’ sex y’all

or, to step away from neologisms

Frontal Lobe Development

A long, complex maturation process that begins in infancy and continues into a person’s early 30s. According to those who have experienced it, ‘It comes with a cat and a good vibrator.’

Clarity

A condition that seems to affect more and more women every day.

Done

That’s what it’s called. You’re done.

Yes, a lot of women are very much done with the dating/marriage/babies game. I mean, I’m happily married, have sons and some excellent male friends, and my male patrons and supporters are the best of the best, but there’s no way on earth, if I found myself single, I’d be looking for a mate.

I snapped mine up before the Manosphere got its dick out and started pissing in the dating pool. Before tender, mutually enjoyable intimate acts were deemed ‘vanilla.’ Before boys started barking at their female teachers. Before watching porn that degrades and dehumanises women became as normal as wiping your bum (and I have intel that some men now favour porn over wiping). Before young women started letting their dates give them brain damage, risking incontinence, a stroke, paralysis or death and believing it was normal, or even ‘sexy’.

There are so many threats: society-wide, if you don’t give us sex, or we’ll get violent! Oh, honey, you already are. That’s why we’re done.

And the men who wouldn’t harm us: we’re sorry, but if you want any chance to go dating again, get married, have kids, you’ve got to fix these other guys. The ones who think that we’re stupid, less-than-human, naturally subservient. We’re so done trying.

This is going to be so good for men. A chance to grow that we’ve denied them because of all we put up with, and excused. We so desperately wanted to think well of them, excuse the odd ‘bad apple.’ But the last couple of years, men (en masse) have really shown us who they are, in podcast after podcast, anti-feminist whine after whine, crime after unprosecuted crime. Stripping women of their rights over their bodies, setting sights on their right to vote.

Imagine making sex incredibly dangerous, life-alteringly, life-endingly dangerous for women, and then whining that women don’t want it.

Listen, we get it. We (most of us) like sex too. When our partners are thoughtful, considerate, hygienic, and into mutual pleasure. But it isn’t a right. It’s a nice-to-have. And as my husband and I like to say to each other, when someone’s been naughty and still expects treats, “bad baby, no biscuit.”2

For years, women kept downloading the latest software updates, getting more and more advanced, while many men, unwilling to adapt, seem stuck on version 1.0.3 And after a while, there’s such a gulf between the updated machine and the unpatched one that they can’t even talk to each other. Different operating systems. It gets so that the one that never got its software upgraded becomes genuinely dangerous to connect to: buggy crap that can crash out on you at any moment, full of viruses and trojans. And so vulnerable to malware that you should never plug it into the internet.

So, listen. Take the updates. I know it’s annoying. You have to stop what you’re doing for a bit, let the machine whir away behind a black screen, giving you no more info than “updating”, with a progress bar so static you suspect it’s gone home to put the kids to bed, make itself a cocktail and watch an episode of Fallout. But no pain, no gain, as men who definitely own a foam roller tell us.

Time to wipe the old hard drive free of every bit of old code that programmed you, as a boy, to think you were ‘better’ than girls … and all that goes with it.

We’re pretty sure you can do it, because women did. And I’ve heard tell that boys are just as capable as girls are — when they put their minds to it.

P.S. First person to say “not all men” in the comments has to send me a tenner.

Writing is my sole means of support. I know, what an idiot! It’s just the way life worked out for this iconoclastic misfit. If you love what I do, let me know in the comments, press the heart, share, upgrade, or

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A Gentleman is Not Necessarily

We are walking to London. The shirt money buys food to save on lodgings, with the weather still fine, we sleep by the roadside. Ma says this is not shameful. Many good people fall on hard times and must do the same on their way to a new life. On the road we meet people our mother calls itinerants. An Irish tinker, who won’t stop talking to us, because when Ma pretends she is deaf, he turns to me, saying things that make our mother wince. A man with a travelling puppet show, which he has been wheeling about on a handcart. When we see him there is no show, unless we are meant to give a farthing to watch him sitting under a tree and crying. Many itinerants are men back from the wars, with their uniforms worn through, and missing pieces of their bodies. Ma says don’t look at them, the itinerants, we don’t want to mix with the likes of them. Doesn’t sleeping in the ditches make us itinerants too? Ma says no, we are honest travellers, a different thing entirely. Pressed further: because we have somewhere to go. Where? Never you mind, she says, you are always full of questions, and questions get a person into trouble. So I shut my mouth, thinking that I am a person today, and glad of that.

In Exeter, Ma diverts us to the river, where she dips her handkerchief into the water and scrubs at her face until it comes up pink and the handkerchief grey. She rinses it in the Exe and then dabs and scrubs at the tell-tale places on her dress, a dress that says here and there it has spent two nights kissing ditches.

She lets that dress dry, with her in it, on Cathedral Green. The Cathedral sits very wide at its front, like a broody hen hatching something under the earth. From the side it looks like a whole lot of smaller churches all squeezed together. The grass around it is well trimmed by sheep but the verger or someone has cleared up their doings. We don’t say much. Ma doesn’t want grass stains on her skirts, so she walks about. But the grass won’t make a stain on your old moleskin trousers, which were made to be the colour of dirt. So I lie back on the grass letting the sun soak into me, like our afternoons on Guzzle Down or at Great Wishings, when the whole sky would sail over us and you’d talk about adventures you’d have, when you were old enough.

When the light fades, we go to an inn with a picture of a white hart, and Ma tells me to wait outside. Swifts are screeching around the eaves, and there’s still heat in the air, and the smell of dinner, which makes me hungry. We had pasties on the Cathedral Green, from a woman who came out of her house with a basket, and Ma wrapped four for the journey, but they are with her and not me. And I am not journeying. The stars come peeping out, and one or two coaches clatter over the cobbles into the courtyard, empty themselves of people and baggage, shed their horses into the stables, and still I wait. Crouch down with my back against the wall, listening to the laughter inside as the ale grows it. Think of that night. I see you put the note in his hand and I see myself running in and snatching it out again, no harm done, and the Dutch sailors laughing at these silly littluns playing a game they don’t understand, a game that would have kept you in Fishtown, with both your shoes, and Mister Lampard with our mother, and me in the straw bed in the eaves next to you, where I would give anything to be.

Ma is gone for so long that I wonder if she has slipped away without me seeing. People come out, laughing and half-falling on the cobbles. The moon has risen until it is high over the Cathedral, silvering the roofs of the houses. Clunker-clunk, the inn door bolted from the inside. I go and relieve myself behind the stables. Then return to my spot, lay my hands down on the cobbles, and my head down on my hands, and pretend that your arms are around me.

I am shaken awake. Two bare feet. Ma’s feet. She straightens herself to standing, clutching a blanket around her shoulders. Underneath, the creamy shock of undergarments. She motions me up.

My bones are so chilled that it’s hard to move, but I follow to the back of the inn, clumsy on my not-woken legs. She signals quiet, then opens the door. A servants’ passage, a narrow staircase. No candle, but I can make out the stairs from the light that leaks through an upstairs window. She creeps along the passageway with me as her shadow. She stops at the third door.

‘Get under the bed,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve put a blanket there. Don’t make a sound and don’t come out until I tell you.’

She opens the door. The bedchamber is flooded with moonlight. The bed is entirely unmade and something — someone — is snoring there. An invisible gentleman is draped over the corner chair: breeches, shirt, waistcoat, hat. Nothing but clothes without any gentleman to puff them up, and her dress beside those things, and a tall pair of riding boots standing by the chair like a soldier on duty. She points me towards the dark space under the bed. I slide under, quiet as I can be. There’s the creak of her getting into the bed above me. So the gentleman has let her share his bed, but there is no room for me. Or it would not be right for me to share with him too. Or he does not know about me. Whatever the truth may be, the only truth that matters to me is that I am not abandoned, and the hard floor is better than the hard ground, and the air inside the inn is warmer than the air without, and I have a blanket to boot, which is not only beneath me but wrapped around me.

For the first few minutes of the morning, there is a great to-do. The whole bed is creaking and squeaking, as though Ma and the gentleman can’t get comfortable, and are wrestling with each other. I think they must be about to get out of bed, but neither Ma’s feet nor the gentleman’s feet land on the floor, and I wonder that they are having such difficulty getting up, except that this is one of the best rooms of the inn, and the mattress is probably filled with feathers, like Lady Upton’s at the big house, and maybe too squashy to make getting out of it very easy. But at last the commotion subsides, with the gentleman crying out like he has hurt himself, and I hear Ma making shushing noises, meaning maybe he has, and then all is quiet again. I am aching to relieve myself, and the chamber pot is right next to my face, but can’t be used without me getting out from underneath. One of them used it in the night, and it is a poor stench for my nose to have for breakfast, but I am determined to be good after being left outside for so long.

Then the gentleman is snoring again. Blessedly, a pair of feet appear — Ma’s — and she makes the smallest of rustles as she gathers up her clothes. She signals me out to the open door and we are away down the stairs. In the rear courtyard she pulls on the rest of her clothes and I help her with her stays and ties. We use the jakes before we leave the premises. We’re walking very fast, faster than usual, getting ourselves back on the road to London. The light is cold and grey, the sun only just coming up.

She says, ‘If we get ourselves to the Black Swan by half past the hour, we can ride the stagecoach to London.’ Seeing my confusion, she reaches into her purse and shows me three golden sovereigns before dropping them back inside.

‘You got them from the gentleman?’ I ask, though I can think of no other place where a woman like our mother would get anything gold.

‘He had plenty,’ she says. ‘We can ride for a hundred miles with one of these. Two of them will get us to London. Come on!’

She picks up her heels, and I do the same.

prev chapter ——— next chapter

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You wonder if humanity will survive this shitshow. I say yes, and bring the receipts. Confronting the dark and steering to the light with clarity, honesty, and a dash of British humour. Come in.

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Yet again, a man has arrived with his opinion.

Feminism destroyed womanhood

says a man in my comments, a man with the unintentional comedy name Daniel Mancini.

How hilariously thick. ‘Womanhood’, the condition of being a woman, is not destroyed by anything except, sometimes, testosterone and the violence of testosterone-makers. Feminism, the belief that women are not inferior to men, destroys the subjugation of women. And CLICK, there it is: that’s how Dan the Man is defining the word. The condition of being a woman = subjugation.

No wonder Dan hates feminism, and feels the need to tell me in the comments of a post about — woah, Dan! — an anti-rape device. First comment:

I am amazed at the level of ignorance perpetrated by people thinking this is a justified means of solution.

Ladies, men can do as much damage as they like, but spiking their peen isn’t justified, and for rape survivors to promote this device makes them “ignorant.” They know nothing about rape, after all, whereas Dan is an expert.

Dan is more concerned about feminism than rape. Rape, yeah, listen, ladies, shit happens, I guess, allegedly, if you can believe what the woman says, and they clearly want it and change their minds later and ruin the lives of innocent men, and the rest of the time, look at the way they act or dress, they’re asking for it.

Feminists, though, don’t get me started on those bitches. First they come for your college places and jobs, and then they expect you to clean up after yourself like a full-grown adult, learn life skills like cooking and washing and knowing your child’s birthday.

Feminists have absolutely ruined dating. You send a woman a dick pic and they act like you’ve flashed them or something. You buy them a couple of drinks, and instead of giving you a blowy in the car park, they blow you off, and later when you text “U owe me 😉”, they reply “I’m not a bargain bin sex worker” (fully punctuated to humiliate you) and block you.

But Dan:

Yes, Dan, men don’t all get a housekeeper now. You don’t all get a replacement mummy by virtue of what’s in your pants. Feminism has freed men’s domestic slaves, and that’s a good thing, right? Because slavery is bad. People — and women are people, Dan, remember —should be free to choose what they do with their lives, and not have it decided by the body they’re born with. Feminism brought women the freedom to vote and get an education, a career we enjoy, a bank account, a house, a car, the works. Daniel. I know this is gutting, but women don’t need men anymore. Some of us might want men, but yes, a lot of us don’t want men who think women are naturally subservient; that our value lies purely between our legs, as sexy maid, incubator, then your brand new mummy. We have brains and dreams and creative brilliance. We always have. And how much further along would humanity be if half of humanity hadn’t spend a thousand years crushing the other half into domestic oblivion?

Dan, this post isn’t really for you, but for entertaining folk who are sick of your shit. And since so many other women are singing this same song so loudly now, and I’ve got work to do (that doesn’t involve the kitchen), I shall bring in some soloists from that choir.

Men are not in crisis because of feminism, but because of a skill gap.

Men aren’t needed anymore and they’re struggling to adapt to being wanted.

Yes, we are not the same.

But there isn’t a “gender war.”

Yes, if we’re honest, we all have some gendered expectations. If you’re a man, and we’re with you, and we hear a noise at night, we might ask you to check it out. But we don’t feel entitled to our expectations. We don’t, like the men in the Married At First Sight investigation this week, expect sex as the price of marriage. We don’t threaten to throw acid in your face if you tell anyone. We don’t respond to disappointed expectations by ending your lives.

I have never met, heard of or read about a woman who murdered a man because he refused to take the trash out… Men, on the other hand, stretch their entitlement to the point of resentment and violence. It is not theoretical…Women have been beaten, battered and killed by their husbands over their inability to cook or because the food had too much salt.

Anita Damina, ‘A Man and a Feminist Go Out to Dinner’

As Marie Shear said in May 1986, "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."1

That’s months off the time that I got my first job — the only woman in a room of forty men in my aptitude test (for logic, coding) — the only person in that group to pass it. Two years later, the only woman on my floor on a management grade, I was sent on a training course for interview techniques. Told the difference between closed questions (yes/no) and open ones, the trainer asked for a volunteer: pick anyone in the room and ask them an open question. The balding man opposite jumped at the chance, and picked me: the only woman on the course.

“Are you married?” he asked (an instant fail, which the trainer failed to pick him up on.)

“No,” I replied.

“WHY NOT?”

Asked with such aggression that it floored me.

I was too young, then — to challenge him, to laugh it off, to tell him it was none of his business — and too young to be married. He didn’t care about the answer. He wanted me to know I wasn’t welcome in that room full of men. My place in the world wasn’t earning good money programming computers, it was housework for a man, having babies for a man, being owned by man. What sickens me is that I was, in fact, already engaged to the man who would (once he had trapped me with children), abuse me and try to destroy every shred of my independence and self-esteem.

A man for whom the idea that women are people was laughable.

Forty years to the month after Marie Shear said it, the fact that it still seems a radical notion to some is, frankly, gutting. But I’m not giving up on this. I’m doubling down. I’m trickling my real-life stories like organic weedkiller (vinegar and love) onto a meadow of flowers and weeds, that the weeds might shrivel, and the flowers might grow.

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I love your comments (if you know that women are people) and will usually respond.

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A Girl’s Job is Not to be Noticed

High summer. Disappointed bees in the pantry, swifts tumbling from the eaves.

Ma’s fingers have stopped working. Ma says it is her eyes. She must make three new shirts for Reverend Ashburner, and one for John Clowter, but they will only be made if shirts are made out of curses. Her stitches have grown large as insect legs, and she cannot thread the needle. She asks me, and when he is about, Mister Lampard, ‘Thread the needle please love, I can’t seem to. These new needles. Why would they make them with such small eyes?’ Her fingers tremble like spring leaves. When I come close to thread the needle, her breath is sour with what she calls her pick-me-up. Mister Lampard comes to supper less and less. Sometimes there is no supper at all. When there is, it tends to the measly and mean. Hard bread that next-door brings over when they have baked fresh. Grey soup. No one mentions you. Your name is worse than a curse word in this house. Say it and get a thick ear. No one need say it though, when it’s everywhere. In her tremble, in her shouting, in her eyes that can’t look into the needle’s eye, or mine. She is fills the hole you left with gin.

Mister Lampard is not the same. His presence feels like something you don’t want to put any weight on, a stone in your shoe. He still holds Ma when she’s crying. One time, afterwards, he comes to me outside on the step where I’m sitting.

‘Tyke,’ he says, ‘you need to pick up your Ma’s sewing.’

I look around me, but can’t see where she’s left it.

‘You need to finish those shirts,’ he says, ‘if you’re to have any food at all next week.’

I look at his face, to see if there’s a trick hidden there. But his brow is heavy as a spade that’s about to bury someone. Seeing he is serious, I spit out what he must surely know.

‘Sewing is for girls.’

‘Tyke —’

‘For girls,’ I repeat. But the look on him is troubling. Though we’re alike as two peas, and I’ve never pulled on a pair of breeches that wasn’t first yours, and though Ma never made any difference between us except liking you not me, there was one thing that marked us apart.

‘Must I be a girl now, I ask?’

‘You don’t have to change a thing about yourself,’ he says, and before I can rise to protest he adds, ‘only do the sewing. You can thread a needle, your hands are small, and it’s fine work.’

‘Women’s work. I’m not a woman.’

‘You’ll be a woman soon enough,’ he says. ‘A good woman too if you are anything like your Ma. Now go inside,’ he says, ‘and say to your mother you would like to help.’

Lie to her, he is saying. Again, I know not to speak, because no grown up likes to be told they’re wrong. And he is wrong, I am nothing like our Ma. But I go in and lie to our mother, committing myself to a prison of needle and thread. A life spent in the freedom of anthills and dew ponds is captured and bridled, forced inside to the gloom.

Sewing is a tedious business. It must be done indoors because outdoors is dusty, even though that’s where the light is. She will not have me dragging the cuffs on the step. I must make my stitches near invisible, small as the threads of the fabric itself, as though it is held together by desire. Women have fashioned themselves like sewing, too. So-called good women, like good stitching, make themselves small enough to be invisible, with not a scrap of rough seam to be shown, every cut turned in on itself and hemmed, like the tight lips of the church wives, hem, hem, hem. Visible women are said to be whores.

Sometimes when I am sewing I make myself so small that the needle is a tiny sword. A slender epee like the French use, which we saw in a duel once on the harbourside, flashing through the air until the French sailor’s opponent was cut so badly that his sleeve turned completely red. Women ran for their needles to sew his arm skin back together, because the man would not have survived a day’s ride to the doctor. And Sarah Foxwill said, ‘What a fuss these men make!’ but I could see she liked it. Something more than the flashing of swords in sunlight glittered in her eye.

I don’t like what the needle does to the ends of my fingers. A thimble protects my left thumb from being sewn into the fingers holding the needle, which rely on the feeling of flesh, get sore and put-upon. Nor do I like the quiet sit-stillness of the seamstress, the eye for only one thing, and that thing the smallest detail that no one will notice. Indeed, if your work is noticed, you have failed. This is women’s work, to make things no one notices. Or things that vanish into people’s mouths so there is nothing to show for it tomorrow, and to do the same chore over and over again, only to have it undone the same day by somebody else. Whereas a man might build a chair or a house or ship: something that might be of use for a lifetime or more.

Our mother pretends she made the shirts herself. She delivers them personally to John Clowter, and to the Reverend Ashburner’s housekeeper Mrs Weevill. She comes back to the cottage with some new calico and a wrapper of chops. She even gives me a little ale at supper, but it makes my mouth sour. Mister Lampard sits across the table looking as though he has already moved away.

Because this is the summer he moves away. He tells her one night after I’m sent to bed. She says,

‘Please don’t leave. Hywel. Hywel.’ And even his name in her mouth is saying ‘You Will, You Will.’

What follows Mister Lampard’s leaving does not deserve too many words. I tell her I won’t be sewing any more shirts. She knocks me to the hearth with the kettle.

When I wake up, some strange calm has come over her.

‘You’re the spit of your brother,’ she says. ‘The spit.’

prev chapter ——— next chapter

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The body keeps the score, let’s take that as read. The book (and its author) are both problematic, but the underlying message of the phrase is sound and distils what we’ve known since the mid 1980s. And you need not have experienced some ‘big-T’ trauma for this to be true. Most of us now live lives pushing Sisyphean boulders of stress from one day to the next: overworked, underresourced, and addicted to bleating harbingers of extinction-level doom in — I was going to say our pockets, but they rarely leave our hands. Many of us sit still for hours every day, eyes on tight focus, shoulders locked in tension. By the time you’re in midlife, there’s a good chance your body will be protesting at your lifestyle.

But are you listening? I spent many years abusing and then ignoring my body: it was just there, it was useful, I didn’t think about it. It was, to my mind, the less interesting part of me. I was all intellect and emotion, and the meatsuit was, you know, nice to have, a pleasure-engine; I got it serviced now and then but mostly took its functions for granted. Then it started hurting, and oh, hello? You’ve got something to say? Body? What’s up?

I didn’t know the language. I got hold of Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, Duolingo for the torso, and ran through the pages, identifying (in simplistic, one-sentence terms) what my thyroid, sprained ankle and occasional eczema were trying to say. But the problem is deeper than those one-sentence summaries reveal. Our bodies are very specific with their messaging. They have their own dialects, rooted in our individual histories. Sometimes the ‘general wisdom’ can be wrong for us.

I discovered this early on. My first experience of EFT tapping was successful pain relief, eliminating a headache that began as I was reading the manual. I chatted about this on a podcast released last week, if you fancy a listen:

Not long after that, I’d come back from a day researching The Marlowe Papers (visiting Scadbury Manor in Kent) and was cooking bolognese for the family tea when I felt a familiar bladder-drag: the early warning of impending cystitis. Hell no, I thought, I don’t need this: days of pain, hours sitting in the bath, drinking gallons of water and gagging on bicarb. So I turned off the hob and went to the bedroom to tap. General Louise Hay-level wisdom regarding bladder issues translates the underlying cause as you’re being “pissed off”. The body is ridiculously literal with your thoughts and words, as discussed here; it takes our habits of speech as instructions.

I didn’t feel pissed off (except about the impending cystitis), but I tried that as a starting point, because I didn’t have another. But I could feel nothing was shifting; if anything the pain was getting worse. But the way tapping works is that before too long the actual cause will surface from your subconscious. And soon I could feel it with certainty. Guilt. My overwhelming thought was I feel so guilty. Guilty that Paul had put himself out for me, and was now taking physical consequences. There was much more walking involved than we knew (the car park being easily a mile from the ruins) and he was in a bad place, then, with his CFS/ME. Because of my insistence he join me for their once-a-year open day (“a nice day out”), he was going to be flat on his back for a week.

And then I realised: I’d started getting recurrent cystitis with Paul because he put himself out for me, and part of me felt that I didn’t deserve it. The first time this had happened, we were barely dating, and he’d driven me to Wimbledon at 5 am and taken charge of getting my three boys to school so I could queue for ‘People’s Monday’ tickets and see my beloved Goran Ivanisevic in the Grand Slam final. A legendary final utterly ruined by a dose of cystitis. My previous few years of recurrent UTIs had been with the only other boyfriend who put himself out for me. So I tapped on this big well of guilt, and not feeling worthy of other people’s kindness, and the dragging ache in my bladder subsided. And get this. No more cystitis. I stopped getting UTIs.

They tell you cystitis is an infection; they treat it with antibiotics. But the fact is, we are swimming in microorganisms. Here’s my working theory: we get vulnerable to developing an infection (picking up one of these ever-present viruses and bacteria) when an emotional injury provides them with an open wound.

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

This Hamlet quote is my touchstone for a reason. The world is a lot weirder than we generally think. Our frameworks for understanding it are limited, and should be marked ‘Under construction.’

Plenty of pain is structural. You break your leg, it’s going to hurt. However, there is always an emotional component to pain, which heightens with any negative story you tell about it: you fear what it means, you’re afraid of the pain itself, or you’re angry with yourself for not looking after yourself.

And some pain has a purely emotional cause: stress (emotions) leading to tense muscles in your back and neck will eventually lead to chronic pain in those areas. Yes, this can include structural issues like slipped disks.

But what’s interesting is that structural problems, visible on X-rays and MRI scans, don’t have to cause pain. Beyond the age of 60, around a quarter of the population show tears in their rotator cuff muscles on MRI scans, but two-thirds will be asymptomatic.1 Studies show around 50% of people with no back pain whatsoever have herniated/bulging discs visible on MRI.2 (And this is where we have to mention the work of John Sarno).

Pain is an electrical signal, and we can reduce it. We just need to find a way to have the conversation with our body. (If you want to try EFT for pain relief, you can register for this month’s session for paid subscribers here.)

Other signs we don’t have a full grasp of how our mind and emotions interact with our physical body: spontaneous remissions and people who defy their doctors’ catastrophising predictions. I met the drummer of Paper Lace once, who’d become a roofer after the band broke up. He’d fallen off a roof and broken his spine. He was told he’d never walk again, but he was driving a lorry when he picked me up, hitch-hiking on the M4. He told me what he’d done every day was just visualised wiggling his toes. They said his spine was severed and it wasn’t possible but he decided he would prove them wrong and as he put it, ‘had nothing else to do.’ So in his imagination, again and again, he wiggled his toes. And one day his toes actually wiggled. And good going, honestly. It’s impressive to hold your beliefs against the pronouncements of authority figures. The nocebo effect is real (and potentially fatal).

They scanned him and saw that his spinal cord had ‘grown back’. Now, it has recently been recognised that zebra fish can do this, but no one thinks it’s possible in humans. When someone makes a ‘miraculous’ recovery of this kind, doctors file it under ‘weird’ and move on. Not understanding the mechanism makes it a fluke, not a model. Plus, they’re working within a paradigm where the body-mind connection is irrelevant: there’s no pharmaceutical profit there; and medical research is sponsored in pursuit of chemical solutions. Thus, our beliefs don’t get challenged, our paradigms don’t shift.

Human beings are evolving. What look like super-human abilities are our natural abilities, unleashed. The limits we accept are largely inherited, not innate — and they shift when we reframe our beliefs. The question then becomes, what do you want to believe? That decline is inevitable; that ageing means racking up aches and pains and losing function?

What if every old-age ache is just baggage we've carried too long and didn't have a way to put down? That score the body’s keeping? I’ve seen it erased like chalk from a chalkboard.

There was a time when nobody believed that a human could run a mile in under 4 minutes. It was thought physically impossible. But once a single person ran a sub-4 minute mile and the news spread, suddenly that barrier was broken all over the place. The way sheer belief makes physical ‘impossible’ things possible gives an inkling of just how powerful the human mind can be, when we don’t let ‘common knowledge’ hamper us.

We’re not too far in, and you can catch up on previous chapters at the Contents Page.

Writing is my sole means of support. If you love what I do, but can’t take out a paid subscription right now, you can support me with a like, a comment or a share: all of them tell the algorithm to increase my reach, which makes a big difference. You can also:

Want to read more? Read double-award-winning novel The Marlowe Papers, Encore Award shortlistee Devotion, or the poetry collections How Things Are on Thursday and Material.

Over to you:

• What’s bugging you in your body right now?

• Have you discovered the root cause yet?

• Ever had a “miraculous” recovery or spontaneous remission / do you know anyone who has?

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If you are currently dealing with physical pain, this one’s for you.

Plenty of pain is structural. You break your leg, it’s going to hurt. However, there is always an emotional component to pain, which heightens with any negative story you tell about it: you fear what it means, you’re afraid of the pain itself, or you’re angry with yourself for not looking after yourself.

And some pain has a purely emotional cause: stress leading to tense muscles in your back and neck in a chronic manner, for example, can eventually lead to chronic pain in those areas, or create structural issues like slipped disks and arthritis.

What’s interesting is that structural problems, visible on X-rays and MRI scans, don’t have to cause pain. Beyond the age of 60, around a quarter of the population show tears in their rotator cuff muscles on MRI scans, but two-thirds will be asymptomatic.1 Studies show around 50% of people with no back pain whatsoever have herniated/bulg…

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The Truth is Mostly Invented

They have laid me out on the table. The back of my head sits on a pad of cloth like an egg in a nest. Mister Lampard’s egg from his sailing days, big as my head, painted with negroes, that a whole grown henny could fit in. From an ostrich, which he told me was a bird a tall as a person with a bald pate and wings made out of hat feathers. He sold the egg when I was seven to buy Ma a new dress for holy days, saying she is a fine woman who deserves fine clothes. The dress was pretty enough, but she got blood on the back of it and didn’t say how, and though it laundered out mostly there remained a stain like the map of a far-away island. My head on the pad of cloth feels as hollow as that ostrich egg.

Pulled all the way up to my neck is a scratchy blanket. From the gin-sick smell of it, the blanket from Ma’s bed. I am listening with my eyes closed. I have surfaced from a ringing, thump-headed silence into scraps of talking that make no sense. Ma sobbing somewhere, and close to me, Mister Lampard’s voice, whispery. Neighbours, too, hushed as though talking in church when they shouldn’t. Sarah Foxwill and Sarah Moxy. Where are you? Arrested maybe, for clonking my father into the drink. Ma’s sobbing rises and falls like a November wind, and I don’t like that it stinks of something lost. The only words I can make out are Mister Lampard’s, because the Sarahs are practiced at talking under their breath, and the only sound they make is a soft sea-shushing. Mister Lampard’s whisper can no more hide itself than a cow can.

‘No,’ he is saying, ‘not that I know.’

‘The little one was out cold.’

‘Maybe. But it weighed anchor this morning.’

‘No, not a sign of him. Margret is fearing the worst.’

The words land on me like rain. Their cold meaning soaks into me. Moving makes my head punch itself from the inside. Your name comes out of me in a rush, with other words that unravel. Mister Lampard leaps to catch me — ‘Stop, little one!’ — and lays me back down, very gentle with my head in particular.

‘Shush now,’ he says, stroking my hair, ‘nothing to be vexing you,’ but his eyes say otherwise.

‘Mark,’ I say. Feeble as a snail.

‘Was Mark with you in the sail yard?’

The yes comes out of me like thin soup, no heft to it at all.

‘What happened?’

My thoughts crawl back. Ringing darkness. Before that? Splash in the water. Before that? You run across the stars with a giant hook in your hands. Before? Crack to the back of the head. Before? My father’s huge maw, grinning. My own eyes staring at me out of his face. My ankle tight in the manacle of his fist. And the two steps I took towards him. Had I stayed put —

I try to shake my head but even the smallest of side-to-side movements hurts like a fresh beating.

‘No?’ he says. ‘You can’t remember?’

And I so want that to be the truth. A person so stupid as to take those two steps towards a brute hanging for his life over the harbour wall deserves to have their head smashed open, and the brains spill out, and never to breathe again. But what has happened to you?

‘It’s all my fault!’

And Mister Lampard says, ‘No, Tyke, No, whatever you done, it was an accident.’

But now Ma comes roaring in, her face so close I can smell the drink in her.

‘Where’s Mark got to? What you done to my boy?’ Shaking my shoulders like I’m cream and she’s making butter. No word dares come out in the face of her fierceness. Which only makes her rage more, until I say,

‘Nothing! I done nothing!’

‘Nothing?’ she says. ‘You done something. It’s all your fault, you said, I heard you!’

Harder and harder, the shaking.

‘I done nothing!’

What you done to your brother?’ Her voice is a needle.

Then something happens in my head. One minute it’s so full of hurt I think it will explode like gorse pods. Next minute I can see her shaking that body on the table but I’m not inside it anymore. Her face, rosy as an apple, and that tight little mouth spitting words. When she says your name, I feel you on the other side of it, still attached to it, like an animal at the end of a long, long tether. You’re in the dark somewhere.

Ma is still blazing but Mister Lampard has her by her shoulders.

‘Leave it off, Margret, poor mite’s had such a knock, you’ll have no children left.’ He tears her off and lays me back down gently. She stands there, arms at her sides shaking uselessly with nothing to hold between them. When my body’s laid down he turns to her and she crumples to the floor, sobbing. If Mister Lampard didn’t stop her, I think she would have shaken me to death. When I fall back into my body, it has fallen, itself, into a long sleep.

When I wake again I am in my own bed. It is half dark, and I cannot tell if that means morning or night. There is talk downstairs, low and halting, and every now and then the sound of a spoon on a platter, which makes me think it must be supper-time - the end of the day, not the beginning. At first I don’t know why I’m in bed at supper-time, and think maybe we’ve been bad. I put my arm out to flop across your body to wake you and ask you. Cold blanket. Strange feeling in my head. Sore lump at the back of it. I remember.

When they know I’m awake, the questions begin. Mister Lampard in charge so Ma doesn’t get into a rage. He calls me to the downstairs room. Stands me in front of him. Ma holds herself at the door, looking out onto the street and vibrating. Very gently he says,

‘What was your fault, Tyke?’

I can’t say about our murder plan, following you down to the dockside, moving when I should have been still.

‘Being born!’ says our mother from the doorway,

‘What were you two doing?’ says Mister Lampard, ignoring her. ‘Why did you go out in the middle of the night?’

How can I say?

‘It was a game,’ I say.

‘What game?’ says Ma. ‘What game? What game?’

There’s no name for this game. Nothing comes. Mister Lampard tries again.

‘What happened to Mark?’

This is the question I want to ask them. If they’re asking me, then you’re lost. Mister Lampard, waiting for an answer, begins to blur.

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s a lie!’ says Ma. ‘Look at those eyes.’

‘How did you hurt your head?’

Hand on my ankle, tug. The truth is impossible.

‘I fell over.’

‘Did Mark fall over?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was anyone else there?’

My father hangs off the side of memory, eyes like my eyes, burning into me, telling me to tell the truth. I shake him off. Say, again, again, like another lump of moss on the path,

‘I don’t know.’

Mister Lampard turns to our mother and says,

‘Margret, we’re getting nowhere.’

Afterwards, she only wants rid of me. She doesn’t want to see me, she says, stay out of her way. Under the covers, the air grows hot. Tears run into my mouth. Later, I take myself down to the harbour. Stare at the fishing boats all tucked up for the day. Go along the side of the dyeing shed, scouting for clues. Nothing at all. No big hook. I stare down into the water for a long time, but its surface fidgets and the depth is stirred up like clouds. The rest of the harbour glints back at me with a sea kind of knowing.

The sea takes things away and brings things back, and sometimes what wasn’t there when you looked before floats in on a friendly tide, or the sunk thing fills with air and rises, or the drowned thing rafts, or the lost thing flops back onto the beach it was stolen from, days ago, weeks ago. Those next days and weeks, I walk along the foreshore looking for any little piece of you. But always there’s nothing, and I go back home through the alleys with my eyes on the ground, hoping no one will speak to me. Once or twice I look up by mistake and catch somebody startling when they see me, thinking I’m you. I never had a scrap of clothing that wasn’t yours. And I see their disappointment, too, when they see it’s only me. I wish I was you, too, so I wouldn’t have to look at Ma looking at me with that wish in her eyes.

Ma sleeps as much as she can. Every night someone from the village comes in to see how she is, and brings something for supper. They stay and talk to Mister Lampard. He is guarding Ma like a pie that needs cooling off, too hot to be cut up and served, though everyone wants a portion of her. I am always sent up right after we’ve eaten so they can speak their minds. I listen through the boards. Have I remembered? Am I maybe too scared to say? Sarah Foxwill says maybe you slipped into the harbour and drowned, but your body got tangled up in the rope when the Dutch ship weighed anchor. Got snagged and dragged out to sea. Will we have a service? Prayers have been said for two Sundays now but if the body has been dragged out to sea, never to return, then a service —

Dragged out to sea. Young men are snatched away to sea all the time in the big cities. When the Dutch ship sailed, might you have sailed with it? Taken by my father for punishment, or for revenge?

I ask Mister Lampard where it was going and he says the West or East Indies. He’s been to the East Indies. Furnace hot, he says. Months away. Markets full of foods that don’t look edible. Bright-coloured birds, reds, yellows and greens. I tell him I think you might have been taken onto the ship. My words vanish like the kind of snow that won’t settle. He puts his meaty hand on my shoulder and says,

‘We all want Mark to be alive, Tyke.’

Ma’s taken to her bed like crying’s a sickness. She’s sure you are drowned. I say nothing to her, for fear of her smacking me to Kingdom Come.

Then your shoe appears. Mercy Hindwish finds it, washed up on the beach, soggy, already growing green fronds like the fishing boats do. Ma knows, and I know, that it is your shoe, but neither will say so. Mister Lampard knows it is your shoe and your death becomes as real to him as the stone step at our door. The whole of Fishtown starts chattering. Where would the boy go with only one shoe? They are waiting for you to wash up on the shore any day now. Not knowing you’re on the way to a land where it’s summer forever and the birds are too bright to hide.

prev chapter ——— next chapter

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Gin is Nobody’s Friend for Long

Bedtime comes fast when Ma hits the gin. Not for her sending us. We send ourselves. First thing, she gets friendly, all ‘cm-ere’, all ‘av-a-cuddle’. She wants to croon to us, especially the baby songs, the ones we don’t remember though she says they were our favourites. For maybe an hour she is the ma she might have been before she got hurt and hard from being, as she says, ‘the widow of a living man’. But even though gin opens her heart and makes her loving for a time, what else is stored behind that loving is not worth staying for, and we don’t tarry on her lap. We squirm off, and duck the loosely curling arm that tries to catch us as we pass, to clear the table and do our chores as fast as a couple of ants. You start the yawning, I catch it like the measles, and we find ten ways of saying how very tired we are before taking ourselves off to bed. Once she starts drinking, the past will come winding out of her, and before too long she’ll tip over the point where she loves her darlings and find the point where she hates our fathers: yours for going to sea, and mine for visiting land. And we are the only bits of them she can hit with her tongue or her clog.

We’re up in the rafters by the time the blazing starts and when splinters of the words come through the floorboards and spear me, you put your arms around me and say,

‘She don’t mean nothing. Don’t listen, Tyke.’

Then after a time she goes quiet, which is gin’s final blessing, the honey after the sting. You slide out of bed and stand there listening. Fully dressed, because you had no thought of going to sleep. The Dutch ship weighs anchor tomorrow, and you’ve a man to send to his judgement.

‘She’s snoring,’ you say. ‘Go to sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Wait,’ I say, and something sits me up like a jack-in-a-box. Even though I’m scared to see a murder, I’m more scared to wait for you, not knowing the where and the what and the how, and afraid you might not come back at all. Suddenly it seems worse to be left not knowing than to know more things than a child should see and know, even if that means I must help you to murder.

‘Well, hurry up and put your scrags on,’ you say. Who knows what time he’ll be too drunk to care?

A tiptoed creep across the parlour and a gentle click of the door and a run-and-duck through the streets and we’re crouched at the back door of the Blue Anchor. A man so tattooed he looks bruised stumbles out to the jakes, putting his hand out to the doorpost to steady himself. He turns to shout something to his friends, and though I don’t know the words, they sound like what you called Dutch. Still crouched, you peer round the door.

‘Is my father in there?’ ‘Must be,’ you say. ‘Though I can’t see him. You have a look.’

We change over. A fog of tobacco smoke. There are not enough stools and two men are leaning on the table. Another is sitting drunkenly in another man’s lap and they’re laughing like donkeys. One is on the floor, his two hands in prayer making a pillow for his head, eyes closed, peaceful as a babe. All of them at the table are a-ragging and a-roaring in their own language, the same as all seafaring men will do with a whole lot of rum inside them. Mister Lampard says they’re so used to being unsteady at sea they must make themselves unsteady on land too. Then I see him, the man said to be my father. Lifting a tankard, the forearm with its five-bar gate.

‘He’s in there,’ I say. ‘The one with his foot on the sleeping man.’

You check again.

‘Good,’ you say. You pull out the note tucked in your shirt, smooth out the creases. I already know what it says. You read it to me that afternoon. It says ‘I have been watching you from afar. Would you spend the night with a lonely young woman before you go to sea? Follow the boy, he will lead you to where I am waiting. Emerald.’

‘Who is Emerald?’ I asked and you said, ‘It is a whore’s name I think.’

You peer in again and I peer with you. John Crappin is standing by them now. He has brought them another large jug of ale, and two bottles of I know not what. He is collecting their coins. Silver is good, no matter whose head is on the shilling.

‘Now?’ I ask.

‘Not with John Crappin there. He mustn’t see me.’

So we wait and we wait, and duck out of the way behind barrels when anyone comes out to use the jakes. We are small enought to be hidden in the dark.

Then the moment comes and you are gone so quickly that it makes me jump when you are back again.

‘He has the note,’ you say. ‘Once we’re gone, follow after us. But don’t get too close. And don’t let anyone see you.’

You hop off down the path and wait there in the darkness. Just the line of your shoulders lit by the moon. I peer round the doorway. My father, and the man next to him, stare into the note like it is a well. Can they read? I remember your mime and wonder whether you did it already. My father screws up the note and bounces it off the head of the sleeping man. I look to you at the gate, but I know I shouldn’t raise my voice. So I tiptoe down the path and whisper,

‘He screwed it up and threw it on the floor.’

‘Blow!’ you say. You go back up the path, I follow like a lamb, and we both of us crouch back down by the barrels. But even as we stop there we can see the sleeping man, no longer asleep, has picked it up and is uncrumpling it. He starts reading aloud in broken English.

‘I have been watching you from afar.’

There is chuckling at the table. Some of them must know English. My father’s brow crunches. He doesn’t know why they are laughing. Someone tells him the joke he is missing. The woken man is laughing so much he can no longer speak and my father snatches the note out of his hand, half tearing it. Then, staring at it, he seems to remember he cannot read, and offers it back, prodding him to read more, and someone else to translate. When the woken man gets to ‘Emerald’, my father leaps out of his chair and bellows ‘Emerald! Emerald!’ and something I don’t understand but can guess means ‘I’m coming!’ because he is clutching his hand to his heart like it is so painfully full of love and that it might burst if he doesn’t contain it, and the whole table roars with laughter. Only then do we realise that he is about to burst out into the night, and you are not in your position by the gate.

We are saved by my father wheeling on his heel by the door to perform an elaborate and wobbly bow to his shipmates. By the time he has unfolded himself and turned himself in our direction you are once again a shadow standing at the gate. He locates you in the darkness, managing the English word ‘Boy?’ before stumbling past, blind to anything but the beacon that will lead him to a woman. His bulk blots you out of my sight for a moment. Then you are a shadow running down to the harbour, and he is stumbling after you.

I am a second shadow, flickering along behind the both of you. His journey is made difficult by the booze. As we approach the waterfront, he is laughing and calling for you to slow down, and the moonlight gleams wickedly on the sea. You’re heading for the yard where the sailcloth is boiled with tar, tallow and ochre until it is a baked crab red. Then winding along the narrow side of the shed. I’m only steps behind my father now. He is snorting through his nose like a bull. He shimmies the bulk of him down the same narrow passage by the side of the dyeing shed, the water twinkling below like a thing waiting to be fed. And as he rounds the corner of it, you do as you said you would: a rope secured to a mooring loop under the harbour wall pulls tight across his path at ankle height, and he trips.

But not quite into the water. With the instincts of a sailor whose body is practised at holding him out of the waves, he has grabbed hold of the rope.

The oaths that come out of him in a flurry of Dutch, I am glad not to know. His body, heavy from sinning and sodden with booze, is dangling over the water. Can he swim? He calls to you — ‘Boy! Boy!’ — and you step out from the darkness warily. ‘Boy!’ he says again. His hands grip the rope. He jerks his head to the side in a motion that asks you to come to his aid. Is he too drunk to know that the rope was pulled tight by your own hands? You stand unmoving.

‘Boy!’ he says, angrily now, and then something in Dutch that cannot be good, with a kick of the tongue and a dark trapdoor at the end of it. Perplexed, you glance at me, and his head swivels round. You have given me away. A grin spreads over his face like ants on bread.

‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Svay!’ And seeing confusion cloud my face, ‘Two!’ He turns his attention to me now, cranking his head to the side. ‘Come!’ he says thickly.

I hesitate. His eyes are twinkling like the water behind him, dark and mischievous. I have seen those eyes in the backs of spoons. Does he see this too, our family likeness? Is that why he is beckoning me towards him? The father who wishes to get a closer look at his child? His smile is unfathomable. I take two steps towards him and you shout ‘Stay where you are!’ but too late: a hand clamps round my ankle.

‘Run, Tyke!’ you say, and I try to pull away, but cannot free myself. You stare, wide-eyed. Now my father grins more fiercely. His eyes darken. He is stronger than he seemed, hanging on the rope with only one hand, and me with the other, but he cannot heft himself back onto solid ground without releasing me. I look into your face, and it is white as if it had seen Millicent Peeler’s ghost. But before I can so much as take another breath you have stepped back, vanishing into the darkness.

‘Mark!’ I cry, and your name echoes back off the cliffs. My father jerks my foot towards him and I crash onto my tailbone and then, as he jerks again, I’m flat bang on the back of my head — a flash of lightning, a sharp pain. I’m staring up the sky and the sky is staring back at me with its millions of eyes, and I can see deep, deep into that forest of nothing at all. Though he’s let go of my foot, though he’s grunting and hauling himself up, there is a buzzing in my ears, louder and louder, and I can’t lift my head, I can’t speak. You roar out of the darkness, blurring through my vision with a huge iron hook in your hands, and the last thing I hear is a splash.

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I know I’m not alone in feeling very angry about rapists recently. The Epstein Files, revealing the way powerful men use rape as currency. The Gisele Pelicot case illuminating that it's not just the powerful men. Then finding out there are thousands upon thousands of Dominique Pelicots, risking our safety and health to turn us into unwitting pornstars in our sleep. Sharing tips on how to drug and rape the women who love them in ‘online rape academies’. Finally writing about my own brush with a spiked drink and attempted rape.

So this week, it was no surprise that an algorithm on Instagram fed me a 'women’s self-defence sleeve’.

VenusGuard is vagina dentata in the form of a hollow silicon tampon, and sharing one of their promotional videos brought me almost unmanageable levels of engagement from people who were cheering and saying “I want one,” expressing anger such a thing even has to exist, saying they’d prefer one that delivered penectomy, and — a sizeable number — saying this thing is more capitalist exploitation of women / normalises rape culture / puts the burden on women / would be dangerous to women.

‘Normalises rape culture’ was an interesting one. Hell, have you not noticed? Rape culture is normalised. That’s where we’re living. That’s why women are trying to raise money for a rape-defence sleeve. Only 3% of rapes are prosecuted, and in England and Wales, only half of those are successful, so 98.5% of rapists get away without consequences. The US and other countries have similar figures. This device could change that.

On the first ‘backstroke’ of a penile thrust, Venusguard attaches to the offending organ like a finger trap armed with razor-sharp, curved barbs, causing incapacitating pain. It can only be safely removed by a clinician. That’s a powerful consequence. It’s also proof that rape occurred: a shredded penis marks the act as non-consensual. There’ll be no he-said-she-said unless what she said was, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I forgot I left it in” (in which case, yes, she will need to buy him flowers.) No more will a rapist be able to say, “She wanted it.”

The objections were a sizeable minority of responses and fell roughly into these categories, many of which are dealt with in VenusGuard’s FAQ.

1. Escalation / retaliation fear — Incapacitating pain is incapacitating. This study shows escalation (and worsened outcomes) come not from women who hurt their rapists but from screaming, which we’re routinely told to do.

2. Band-Aid, not a solution, ‘we need to educate men not to rape’ — Uh-huh. How’s that going? Until we get a solution, a lot of women would like a Band-Aid.

3. Workarounds / circumvention — Possible, but only if these become so commonplace that men start expecting them. They’re not visible. Most rapes are opportunistic rather than premeditated, and many, many men will be caught out.

4. Deceptive use by angry women — Any device can be misused, but even if this did happen, it would be a tiny fraction of a per cent when set against actual rapes.

5. Doesn’t cover all kinds of rape — Yes, it’s vagina-specific. We don’t ask a toaster to wash the dishes. It’s really good at making toast, though.

6. Gang rape — See the FAQ, but in short, men mostly rape women because they can, consequence-free, and once consequences are on the cards, they will scarper.

7. Doesn’t cover all rape scenarios, ‘most rapes are by people you know’ — I have no idea why people imagine this is only for stranger rape. It works perfectly well with people you know: your date, your colleague, your rapey uncle. Your husband who’s drugging you and raping you in your sleep.

8. We don’t know when we’re going to be raped —Valid. But we can cover our most high-risk times.

9. It doesn’t stop rape. It activates on penetration. — Sure. But it stops it on the first thrust. Yes, assault has already happened, but the victim can get away without further damage, and trauma is lessened by that and the sense of justice.

10. Cutting into the penis could increase infection risk — Immediate withdrawal on being cut suggests to me that infection risk would be considerably less than continued rape to ejaculation.

11. And then all the replies that thought this would join you to the rapist, having not understood it attaches firmly to his dick, which he will withdraw from you like it’s been sliced up by razors (because it has) … I suspect we will never get to the end of all the marvellous variations of misunderstanding available to the human brain.

Finding out that an earlier version of this device had never been commercially produced sent me running to the archives. The Rape-Axe was invented by a white South African phlebotomist called Sonnet Ehlers. who saw a lot of rape survivors in her clinic. As it says on the VenusGuard site:

One of our original co-inventors, Sonnet Ehlers, continues her own important work promoting and educating about Rape-aXe in South Africa and other regions where more direct terminology is readily accepted. VenusGuard is our pivot to open ears and bypass censorship in Western cultures. She is understanding of what is happening with VenusGuard, but she just wanted to keep the old name in her country.

I was interested to know why it has taken 20 years to get us from patent to crowdfunding for production. I went diving deep into the archives, the data, and various studies, working on a piece for a national paper. I interviewed VenusGuard’s Campaign Manager, Hope Leone, an inspiring, passionate survivor. All week I’ve been researching and writing about rape. Swimming in a cesspool of rapists. No surprise, then, that I’ve had to sit down and tap on the statement “I hate rapists.”

Let’s clarify who I mean when I say “I hate rapists.” I mean your mate down the pub. I mean Steve in accounts. I mean Clive, the friendly taxi driver. I mean your housemate. I mean Wayne the chef, who shinned up the drainpipe of the hotel where I was staying with my parents in Guernsey and climbed into my bedroom, and Cyril Littlewood MBE of the World Wildlife Fund, both of whom got no further (thank God) than copping a feel. I mean ordinary men who don’t look like monsters. Men who just take sex wherever they can, because they can, because they know it’s your word and against theirs and the system’s rigged against you. Sure, some rapists are vicious, dangerous and armed, but most rapists pass among us as ordinary men armed with nothing more than the extra strength nature gave males, and a sense of entitlement.

“I hate rapists” (both the Steves and the monsters) is a totally valid position. And anger is more empowering than sadness or despair; anger can make great renewable fuel.

But I don’t tolerate the jag of negative emotion for long these days: like an ant-invasion, if I spot it, I want it gone. Because I want a better world, and we are most in our power when we’re fully aligned with our light and brilliance. Strong emotions cloud mental clarity, which I value too highly to give it up for a bunch of bad dicks.

As always, once the anger was released, an insight arrived. We can all of us access deep knowledge when we are at peace (through meditation, for example): the ability to step outside the tumult of the moment we are in and sense a bigger mechanism at play. That mechanism at the centre of my passions, human evolution, working through the spirit. A new version of our species, adaptively changed for the better.

It came in such a potent formulation that it shocked me. For a while, it was the title of this piece. But it sounded like clickbait, intended to enrage, and I don’t think we need more fury right now. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t land with the general readership of this essay (rape survivors especially). Or the people who will say, “This device is disgusting”, or “It’s horrible this has to exist”, or “We should just educate men.” (We have tried. Do you think our everyday rapists only learn experientially? Is VenusGuard the night class?) Rape is too emotive. And comments on that Note had the flavour of Twitter or Instagram: most watched for five seconds, then straight to knee-jerk reaction without reading replies. So. For those of you who I know are ready for the deep stuff, it’s below the paywall.

Where the comments are, too (Substack makes this happen when you stick in a paywall). Which I mostly dislike, but this week it works, because on Sunday morning, I’m heading to Devon for a Buddhist meditation retreat (a gift). It seems a foolish move to spend a week being Zen and return to a shit-ton of comments about sexual violence. Better a more manageable dose, which I can read on my return.

Rape has been happening, perhaps at these levels, for millennia. Rises in official statistics can be put down to increased reporting (5 in 6 rapes currently go unreported). Vagina dentata is folkloric, appearing across multiple cultures for thousands of years: the vagina with teeth: the raped woman’s wish for revenge, the man’s worst fear.

What’s been happening recently has simply been this: we have started talking, and sharing our stories. We have started to shrug off the shame that silenced us and put it where it belongs: on men who rape.

We have started to discover the shocking breadth of the problem: from the President of the US, to the Spiritual ‘Guru’ who worked with Oprah, to the intellectuals in academia, to the neighbour next door who serviced our car and then raped us, at our husband’s invitation, in our sleep.

So I think it’s time to bring folkloric armed vaginas to the table, for those who would like them. Time to do with consequences what we are doing with shame: start shifting them from the survivor of rape to the rapist.

Hopefully, soon, the answer to “What was she wearing?” will be “Teeth.”

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The Gift May Be the Wrapping

Saturday wakes me up with the sound of carts taking fish to market. Up past the Cowtown toll they meet other carts carrying all God’s living things, and dead ones too. Turkeys and chickens, turnips and onions, mackerels and cockles: anything you can kill and put in a pot is going off to get sold so that someone can eat it. I shove your shoulder a couple of times but you’re worn out from scouting so I’m first down to breakfast, except there isn’t any, because of Ma’s fright at the harbour. Ma sends me to Clowter’s for brisket. I hate John Clowter’s and she knows, but she never minds how I feel about anything. All those dead animal bodies hanging from Clowter’s ceiling, the rabbits stretched out like they were leaping away before they got bloody, the half pigs showing the side of their ribs no-one was meant to see, the chickens all naked and their white fishy eyes staring pure deadness, right into my heart like its own winter. I start upstairs to wake you, but she snatches my wrist, tells me to leave you sleeping.

There’s nothing for it but to clatter down the steps to the harbour. Grace Foxwill’s da is sitting on his steps mending a net and says, ‘Watch yer feet, Tyke,’ as I go by. There’s two more ships stocking up in the harbour beside my father’s, and some fishing boats too, and gulls are making a racket around somebody throwing out fish guts. I don’t look up at the deck of the Dutch ship. It’s moored there like a hill of trouble, but my eyes don’t need to climb it. I go past like I’m being whistled somewhere, half running.

John Clowter is blowing smoke outside his shop, with the big pipe he got from a whaler. For a minute I think this saves me from looking at all the dead things but the minute he sees me he says, ‘Ah, young Mark,’ knocks out his pipe and steps back into his shop, like I should follow. I don’t tell him he’s wrong on the name. I am wearing your last year’s breeches and maybe his eyes are not so good. And maybe wearing your name I can be braver, not shivered up my spine by the beasts and half-beasts dangling in the window. In he goes, and I go after.

There’s a shuffle at the back of the shop, and Peter Moxy vanishes like a wish. You remember one time we were playing Spit-Split with Peter in Tinkers Wood and he took an eyeball from his pocket and popped it into his mouth? Deep brown stare-ball in the centre of whiteness still carrying the fright of the cow that looked out of it when a man cut its throat. Peter kept his lips open for the eye to stare out. You ran away laughing, ran halfway along the path to Great Wishings, but I got stuck on the deadness of that great big eye staring out of Peter Moxy’s mouth. I stared down the hole of it and saw Peter Moxy himself, taller and thinner, laid out on a winding sheet, his face like chalk and his head cracked open.

‘Death’s coming for you too,’ I said. He stared at me, his face blown empty like a handful of flour in the wind. He spat the eye out on the ground.

‘Ma wants some brisket,’ I say, working hard not to meet the death stare of two hares that have twirled towards me, tied up like newlyweds.

‘That so?’ says John Clowter. ‘Your Ma happen to give you any money?’

I say nothing, because nothing is the answer, and those two naked bunnies are closer to each other than Jesus to his own cross.

‘On the slate is it?’

I nod, trying to place my eyes in safety, but there’s death hanging behind him, death twizzling in the window, death in the back room where Peter Moxy rinses pig guts for sausages and drops entrails onto pink sawdust.

John Clowter sighs, hefts a part-carcass onto his board and picks up a cleaver. He doesn’t bring the blade down. He just holds it, slicing sunlight into my eye as accidentally as his apprentice, in a few weeks, will hack off the end of his finger.

‘Your Ma’s a fine woman. Tell her I want to see her, won’t you? This will be the last bit of brisket, or anything else, until I see her.’

Nod. Down comes the cleaver.

Making my way home I get another fright, almost as bad as that pair of bald bunnies dancing in the window. Sitting on a mooring post, reading a book, is Reverend Ashburner. He’s not speaking a word, but his voice sounds in my head like the church bell. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ he intones, though he hasn’t so much as snuck a glimpse at me, and his lips are pursed together like a oyster’s. ‘Honour thy father and mother.’

I stop like a steer snagged in a halter. A queasy feeling rising. We’d be breaking two commandments at once. He feels me there and his big cow head starts moving around to speak at me, but I pick up my knees and start running, fast as I can, running up the long steps, leaping over the half-mended net and the legs of Mister Foxwill — ‘Tyke!’ — all the way home. You’re at the door waiting for me. You catch me by my shoulders, turn me around and put my back against the wall, though I’m breathing so hard I have to bend double for a bit.

‘Best not,’ you say.

‘But the meat —’

‘She’s blazing. Listen.’

Through the door I can hear Ma arguing with someone, telling them they’re no good, a stupid dummon, a dawcake. And then the person she’s shouting at shouts back, and it’s Ma again.

‘You’ll catch the back of her hand,’ you say. ‘Or worse.’ You touch your hand against your ear, split at the top by a nail in a shoe, when you told her the truth one time. ‘Best wait till she’s done,’ you say. ‘Come on.’

You snag my fingers and we’re off up the hill, past the last of Fishtown’s doors and into the meadows. We’d stop at Guzzle Down but Old Peaty is there talking to the cows so we go further up to Great Wishings, where the witch elms take the meadow under their skirts and the sun isn’t so fearsome. I’m out of breath, not so much because of the hill or the distance, but the scare of the near-smack, which sticks in my windpipe like a fishbone.

‘Let’s sit,’ you say, and we slide our backs down the trunk of the middle elm.

‘What did Clowter give you today, then?’

You don’t mean the brisket. John Clowter wraps his joints and sausages in old broadsides. You unroll the outer layer, leaving the brisket in its pinkish inner layer on the grass, and start trying to make out the words. Mister Lampard’s been schooling you. He says boys go further if they can read themselves out of trouble. After wrestling broke him, he took the King’s sixpence in Plymouth. While he was at sea, he met a schoolmaster who’d been pressed into service to get out of debtor’s prison and that man taught him his letters. The navy was worse than slavery, Mister Lampard said, and he never would have joined if he could read. So he’s saving you from slavery with the alphabet. And now you’re hungry for scrawl and type, and the meat wrappers with their old news.

‘Hey, it’s a hanging one, and there’s a ballad! To the tune of Digby’s Farewell, it says.’

‘Who’s hanged?’ I say. ‘What did he do?’

‘Not he! A woman! A woman!’ More excited to think of someone getting hoisted out of her skirts — just for the difference — you read jerkily: ‘The Trial and Execution of Mary Caistor, Who Suffered Death This Morning at the County Jail, Horsemonger Lane, Southwark, for the murder of her husband. Shall I sing the ballad?’

Most often I say yes to your singing, but today there’s a chill in me at the thought of it and I put my hand on your arm and pull it down so the broadside lowers out of your eye line and the only thing you can read is my face.

‘What’s the matter, Tyke?’

‘It’s a sin,’ I say. ‘It’s against two commandments. Thou shalt not kill is one, and honour thy father and mother the other. The man is my father whether he meant to be or not, and we will be sinning whether we’re caught or not, and if we’re caught we’ll be hanged, and if we’re hanged we’ll go to Hell.’

You laugh. You say, ‘None of that will happen.’

But I keep my eyes on yours the way a dog looks at a man’s dinner.

‘All right,’ you say. ‘You’re scared. You don’t have to do it. I’ll do it alone.’

‘But then you’ll sin and get caught and hanged and go to Hell, and if that happens —‘

I am already crying just from making that happen in my head.

‘Shush now, I won’t be caught.’

‘And then you’ll be in a ballad, but I’ll not be able to read it.’

‘They’ll never make a ballad out of me. Not a hanging ballad, anyway.’

I grip onto you very tightly, like you’re already dead. I cry the tears that will wake you up again, like a fairy story. You laugh and shuck me off.

‘Get away with you!’

You put the broadside down and an arm around me. You take me through it: the rope pulled taut by the harbour wall, a sploosh in the dark, and another drunken sailor drowns a few feet from land, like three others already that I can remember. For having the cast of an accident I like the plan well enough, but I don’t know how you’ll get my father on his own, when sailors go around so much together, especially when they are swaying drunk and singing their way home.

‘He likes a woman, don’t he?’ you say. ‘Likes to get a woman alone and knock her lights out and put a baby in her? When he’s properly in his cups, I’ll get a note to him that there’s a woman wants to see him.’

‘Does he know English?’

‘I’ll show him,’ you say, and you strip your arm out from me to show me the mime, which needs both hands.

‘Looks like you’re selling apples.’

‘Shut your tatie trap!’

You leap up to do it better, swinging hips side to side too, and I suppose it wouldn’t take too much thinking to make your mime into a woman.

‘What about the commandments?’

You slide your back down onto the tree trunk again, right next to me.

‘It’s still sinning,’ I say, ‘even if you don’t get caught.’

You put your head against the tree and your knee starts jiggling. You say,

‘Don’t our soldiers kill every day in the name of the king? Are they told they are sinners and will go to Hell? No, they’re given eight ounces of dried beef and a pound loaf and quart of beer daily, a blanket for their beds and the king’s face in their purses.’

‘But they kill our enemies.’

‘Where in the Bible does it say “Thou shalt not kill, except if they’re your enemies”? Who decides who are the friends and who are the enemies? Not long ago, Mister Lampard says, we were killing the Dutch. The Dutch were the enemy. Now we have a Dutch king and fight shoulder to shoulder with the butter-bags.’

I take a big breath, wanting to speak, but the words don’t come straight away. There’s a wind stirring the tree above us. You start up again.

‘The way they give us these rules, and say they are God’s rules, but go by whatever rules they like, I say this is all stories, all nonsense, to keep us in our place and them in theirs. Lady Upton travels all ways and none in her coach and horses. But Peter Moxy’s feet grew out of his one pair of shoes when he was ten and he had no more until he was twelve and Mister Clowter give him some so he don’t have to stand in pig guts. Lady Upton gets a tenth of all the harvest for doing nothing at all, and old Albert Downey, who fought for King and country as boy and man, laboured in the fields until he dropped dead in a hedge. Reverend Ashburner schools us against sin before tucking into his roasted fowl every Sunday, but Millicent Peeler, thin as a willow, gets hanged for a stolen henny.’

Millicent Peeler’s name is an oath between us. Her ghost has been seen six times on Marshy Lane, white as a winding sheet. Just the thought of her chills me, but you haven’t noticed. You’re rattling on.

‘It’s one rule for the rich and another for the poor. You know how the Uptons ended up with the fat house on the hill? How they come to own all the land around here so every farmer must lease it, and give Lady Upton a measure of their grain when harvest comes?’

I try to shake the ignorance out of my head.

‘They stole it from us. From us, Tyke. This land used to be common land, belonging to every one of us, and we were free, and then the Normans invaded and took it from us.’

‘The Uptons aren’t Norman.’

‘They all are. Mister Lampard says they Englished their names, so we would think they were the same as us, and forget about them stealing our land. Them that can remember die, and new ones are born who think that’s just how it is, as if it’s God’s own order and has always been that way. They get the priests to say that it’s God’s will, too.’

‘Is it not God’s will?’

‘“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Mister Lampard’s been all over this world, by sail and shoe-leather. He says he don’t want me walking into it with my eyes closed like he did. He says we should know that even if we don’t have a pair of boots between us, that we’re as good a human as anyone we’re supposed to bow to.’

I pluck up a piece of grass so I’ve got somewhere to put my eyes that’s not your face. I strip that piece of grass down to its core, the part that’s white and you can crunch flat between your teeth.

‘That man dishonoured our mother. Did he not covet another man’s wife? Did he not mean to kill her with that clonk to the head? And don’t those who tell us to obey the commandments break them themselves?’

That little stem of grass can’t hold me safe from you any longer. I look into your face and it’s as fierce and bright as the sun itself, burning the truth into me: the truth about who we are, and what we could be. And like a spark leaping from a tinderbox onto a field of high August wheat, you set a blaze in me. A blaze that might burn down the whole field of my life.

How to evolve humanity? Person by person. Let’s heal trauma, master our emotions, and manifest a better reality. Warning: potentially triggering content. Please give yourself all the care you need, and shut this down if today is not the day. Sending love to all survivors.

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‘Why does it matter, when it doesn’t affect you?’

The porn site, Motherless, is what he’s talking about. The 20,000 videos of ‘sleep content’ where men have drugged their wives, girlfriends and fiancées so that they can rape them without their knowledge. Film them, stream them, upload the results. I contend that my husband of 25 years is a good man, but I know he doesn’t get it; doesn’t want to. On his terms, it’s simple: if it makes you upset, and it’s not directly affecting your life, look away. Stop reading about it. Tap away the anger. Turn your eyes to the sparrows squabbling at the feeder, hang out with your offspring who love you, watch comedy.

To be fair, this is my philosophy too. The only way to stay functional in the face of dark times is self-care. As a sensitive person, I’m shielded from the news by design. Two decades ago, I ditched the news in all its forms to stop my mood being buffeted by grief or anger at events I cannot control. That way lies paralysis, despair and ‘what’s the point?’ Somewhere in the world, we are always at war, there will always be disasters and damaged individuals, and I don’t want to end up like my mother-in-law, afraid to go outside. Then social media arrived, with my friends, and other writers, and its jokes and its memes and its cute puppy pics, and the news bled through.

I limit who I follow or click on; let the algorithm know to give me literature, comedy, therapy, easy on the politics. But, being connected to thousands of folk who aren’t buffered, the big stories make it to my timeline. On the whole, I resist. I label it ‘pain’ and don’t peel back the skin. Major horrors have glanced off my surface like sunlight on a lake. I don’t have a moral duty to incapacitate myself. I can’t afford to go there.

But the Pelicot case last year? That was different. It was something that felt essential to understand. The reality of the world we women are actually living in. That reality being so much worse than we knew. Women spend our lives conducting a seemingly endless series of risk assessments: avoiding that carpark, that badly lit street, that ground floor flat, that man, that dress. But none of us knew that our homes could be so unsafe. That, spurred on by the man we loved, our neighbours might rape us without our knowledge one evening, and the next day sell us a loaf of bread.

That felt like an important software update, one essential for every woman to install.

This ‘rape academy’ news is a patch on the update.

#eyecheck

In these videos, men film themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show they are sleeping or sedated, with some “eyecheck” videos surpassing 50,000 views. — ‘Exposing a Global ‘Rape Academy’

Women and girls live under the male gaze. I remember when it first landed on me, around 14 (later than some). For about three days, I was pleased: I hoped, after all, for a boyfriend. But you can’t control which males are gazing, or what they do next. The foul comments, the cat calls, ‘smile love’, ‘nice jugs’, ‘suck my dick, Blondie’. For the next thirty years, these intrusions randomly derailed my trains of thought. Never mind the stalking (more than once) and those men so persistent you’d end up screaming ‘fuck off!’ or faking a boyfriend or climbing out the bathroom window. Or on one memorable occasion, aged 33 (there was context), grabbing the guy’s nuts through his trousers and giving them a twist.

On the streets, I learned that if you accidentally look at a man, you’re increasing the chance he’ll harass you, and the habit of looking at my feet became so ingrained that, still to this day, Paul will say ‘Look up!’ Traditionally, the men who see women only as objects, they want you looking at them, when they say something crude.

But the rape academy men don’t want you to see them. They’ll drug you free of your shocked, accusatory look. They want the male gaze only; want other men to see them using you. They’ll put you under the gaze of strangers, in all your vulnerability: that turns them on. It shows they own you. They’re in control. They can film you and pimp you without your knowledge, monetise your humiliation. They find community with other men who share dosages to help them balance your life between unconscious and overdose.

There’s a personal reason I can’t close my eyes to the rape academies.

Echoes at Crater Lake

In 2015, I hired a sports convertible and drove from San Francisco to Ashland, Oregon. Drove up the Pacific Coast Highway with the roof down. A breathtaking drive that twice, driving through the stands of giant redwoods, filled me with such joy I had to stop and cry. I was on my way to present a paper at a conference and had chosen the drive to visit my childhood haunts around Berkeley first, and then, yes, have an unforgettable road trip.

Weird, that some stranger I’d met on a Marlowe forum, who lived in Ashland, had said in an email, when I mentioned my plans, ‘You don’t want to drive’. I said, ‘Yes, I do. You clearly don’t know me.’ He tried to put me off hiring a car — why not just fly? I ignored him. None of his business. “Over-protective” men, who think they know better than you (or think women can’t drive)'; I’d dealt with them all of my life.

He wanted to meet me. Sure. Why not? Fellow Marlowe enthusiasts are rare, and sharing a passion is often a pleasure. ‘Have a break from the conference after your paper,’ he suggested. ‘Instead of the conference buffet, I’ll buy you lunch.’ I pointed out that the lunchtime after you’ve delivered a paper is exactly when people will most want to talk to a person and say nice things, so no, “but you could join in the buffet?”

He introduces himself after the paper. He joins for the lunch. He’s easy on the eye and good company, but seems not so keen on hanging around with the others. He tries to persuade me to go with him somewhere else, “get away from these Oxfordians.” But I say, “I have friends here,” and also, papers I want to hear.

“Tonight?”

“There’s a theatre visit planned.”

“So when are you free?”

“Maybe the final evening,” I say. “Early evening, before the farewell dinner.”

Just ahead of that is a free afternoon. I’m planning to drive up to Crater Lake. The deepest lake in the USA, it’s more than a third of a mile at its deepest point, and apparently, unbelievably blue. So clear you can see 100 feet down.

“We should meet for a drink after that,” he says, and I say, “Okay.” The guy isn’t boring. We haven’t talked much about Marlowe. It seems pretty harmless.

On my way to Crater Lake, my phone pings. I pull off for a slice of cherry pie at a place recommended to me by a friend (too Twin-Peakish by nature to ignore) and read the message. The guy, confirming the venue. And can he pick me up?

—No, I’ll drive. I’ll just have one.

—What do you drink? Wine? Spirits?

Something’s tingling. Some deep, intuitive alarm bell.

—Why do you want to know?

—So I can have one ready for you when you arrive.

The alarm bell rings a little louder.

I shut down my phone. Finish my pie and get back in the car.

Heading for the lake, I’m barely noticing the view. I’m wrapped up in thoughts. He didn’t want me to drive. Even from the beginning, that email. He wanted to separate me from the people I knew, take me out of the conference. And now, he wants to know what I drink. Wants to have a drink “waiting for me.”

I begin to feel an energy, sexual energy. Like a plan, something he’s thinking about. I see myself, seeming drunk, barely able to walk, being taken into a garage where a bed is set up, and a camera. My sports car is miles away, at the saloon.

Now maybe it’s fear plus imagination. Maybe it’s instinct. Maybe it’s a premonition (I have had them before). But the feeling is growing louder and louder.

At Crater Lake, I get out of the car and walk onto the rim. Look into the lake’s blue eye. Its depth and its clarity. I will stay at the lake for a long, long time. I will not be going back for a drink.

This Wine Tastes Off

Because years before, I went for a drink with a charming stranger. A Frenchman. Good-looking. A year or two younger than me.

I was two years out of an abusive marriage, and still in the throes of a hostile, exhausting divorce. My kids had just gone to stay with their Dad for the first few days of the Easter Hols, and with some rare time to myself, I’d caught the train to London to meet some online friends in real life for the first time. Spring had finally arrived, and it was warm enough not to wear a coat.

I was walking through London’s Soho when he asked for directions. I was clear as I could be, but he didn’t understand me. It wasn’t far, and I had time, so I walked him towards the road he was after, and while we walked, we got talking. He asked if I’d join him for a drink. As a writer, I feel driven to say yes to unexpected plot twists, so long as they don’t look dangerous. Experiences can make material. So why not have a drink with a good-looking, charming Frenchman?

“Just a coffee,” I said to the barman.

We chatted for a while, then I had to set off for the pre-arranged meetup. “Maybe we can meet up later?” he said. “Can I have your number?” And I thought, why not? Perhaps this is the start of something fun, maybe even something good in my life. About time, surely, for something outside angry exes and disturbed little boys.

Meeting my online friends in person, in an upstairs bar, involved multiple Wizard-of-Oz moments: the curtain pulled back from screen names that possess a certain pizazz to find ordinary humans, stripped of their witty repartee. Some of us are better conversationalists with the buffer of time to think and edit. So I was happy to answer a call from an unknown number that came with a French accent. “Join us!” I said, but he was keen for me to leave them. “Spend some time just you and me.” In fact, he was waiting for me downstairs. We walked to a pub a few streets away, and he asked if he could buy me a Pernod.

“Half of cider,” I said.

“You sure you won’t try a Pernod? It’s very good. Very French.”

“No, I know Pernod. I’d rather have a cider.”

“Really? What about a glass of wine?”

I let him persuade me.

I went to the loo while he got the drinks. If you’re a woman reading this, you are probably already thinking Oh shit. You are correct. Bear in mind, I’d been locked in a marriage for a number of years, and was brand-new to 21st-century dating. MySpace and Facebook did not yet exist. I’d not seen coverage of this kind of thing in the news. No one was yet selling condoms to put over your drinks or spike testing kits.

When I got back, he was at a small table. I took one sip of the wine and said,

“This tastes off.”

“Are you sure?” he said.

I had another sip.

“Yep. Really weird. I’m going to take it back to the bar and get another.”

“I’ll do it,” he says, and does so. “Keep this table,” he says. Where the table is, while he’s at the bar, I can only see his back, and not what he’s doing. But I don’t know that I have to. He returns with a replacement glass of wine.

“Jesus,” I say, after taking a sip. “This is off, too. This bar serves terrible wine.”

“Maybe it’s just the brand of wine,” he says. “Maybe it’s meant to taste like that.”

“Well, it’s foul,” I say. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

I stand up and straight away, I know something’s wrong. I feel seriously drunk. What’s happening? I had a glass of wine at the other place, and only a few sips here. How can I be this drunk?

“Steady!” he says, and laughs. “You’ve had one too many.”

Have I? I can’t remember. This doesn’t feel right. Am I really this drunk, this quickly? Am I really such a lightweight? Something’s happening to me. He takes charge.

“You just need some fresh air,” he says. “Let’s go for a walk.” I’m swaying so much that he has to hold me up, and he’s laughing at how drunk I am. I’m laughing too. It’s ridiculous. I’m not sure what’s happening, but I like this man.

He helps me towards a main road, and suddenly I know where I am. Trafalgar Square. We cross to one of the giant lions. He climbs up on one and holds down his hand to pull me up. Now I’m sitting, facing him, straddling a lion, the iron cold through my trousers. He shuffles up close and holds me steady (because I think I might fall). He kisses me, and I don’t mind.

Which is weird, because I do. Because actually, I’m in love with someone. A brief affair from the year before that I haven’t got over. This guy’s got his tongue in my mouth, and my body’s responding, and the part of me that I would call me is like a tiny person trapped in a room at the end of a very long corridor shouting something I can’t really hear.

I break off and say, “It’s really cold.” He reaches into his jacket pocket, brings out a hip flask, and says, “This will warm us up.” He puts it to his lips, seems to take a sip, passes it to me, and I take a sip too. That Pernod he so wanted me to try. A strong taste.

He snogs me again, and now his hands have slipped under my top, are inside my bra, on my breasts, and my body’s just going along with it all, my body is keen, my body says Yes, mmm, Yes! and the part that is me, locked down the end of that long, ever longer corridor is shouting,

“You don’t want this! You’re in love with Luke! You love Luke, remember!”

I can hear it, I can, but it feels like there’s nothing I can do. That part’s not in charge. I’m going wherever this man wants to take me.

He helps me off the lion, and he takes me by the arm. Leads me into a nearby street, though I’m very unsteady, struggling to stay upright. It’s busy with revellers, and he’s weaving me through. “Where are we going?” I slur, and he says, “Somewhere quiet.” I know what’s coming next. A quiet back alley, somewhere dark, with just kitchen waste bins and no traffic. And I know, despite everything my body’s going along with, I know I don’t want it. But he’s stronger than me. And I’ve no strength at all. He’s gripping me tightly, both hands on one arm.

Then one blessed moment. A police car just yards away puts on its siren. The shock makes him loosen his grip, and as it wails past us, I tug my arm free, and run. Run in the same direction as the police car, back towards the one place I know in my drug-addled state. I say run, but mean stagger at speed, trying very hard not to bump into people. I make it to Trafalgar Square, and he hasn’t followed.

But I’m not safe. I have to get home. My overnight home, a flat in Streatham that my parents own. I find the right bus stop, and now, I’ve just got to stay conscious. But there’s nothing ‘just’ about it. The drug is heavy in my system and shutting it down. At the bus stop, I’m falling asleep on my feet, aware of the strangers around me judging me, a paralytic woman whose speech makes no sense, who can barely stand. The bus's arrival is a blessed relief. I need the top deck so I can see where I am. But now I’ve got a seat, somewhere to fall asleep, and my body is saying shut down, shut down. For the whole next hour, I’m fighting to stay conscious. My eyes keep closing, and then I’m asleep, but each time the bus stops, that tiny little me at the end of the corridor jolts me awake, check the stop, check the stop! I can hardly believe it when I finally see it, ring the bell, clatter down and out and through the doors, and I’ve made it.

But I haven’t. When I get to the flat’s front door, I realise there’s a problem. I have the key, but can’t put it in the lock. Because inside’s an alarm and the minute I go in, I’ll have 30 seconds to put in the number. A four-digit number.

I know this number. It’s easy. My mother set it. It’s the last two primes before 100. The last two primes before 100. We’re number people, my mother and I. “The last two primes, so you’ll never forget it.” That’s right, Mum. I’ll never forget it. Unless I’ve been spiked.

I slump down by the door. Last two primes. Last two primes. I can’t think of any.

I don’t know how long I’m slumped on the concrete walkway, losing consciousness, trying to do maths. Then they come! I know them! Key in the lock, numbers on the keypad, and door shut safely behind me.

I don’t get any further.

The next morning, I wake, still by the door, with my face on the doormat, in last night’s clothes, a metallic taste in my mouth. As soon as I was somewhere my body felt safe, it shut down.

I take myself into the kitchen, make a coffee in a slant of sunlight. Try to put together what happened. My phone’s out of charge, but once it’s charged up, I call the police.

GHB, the police surgeon reckoned. It leaves your system within 12 hours, so there was nothing to test, but she said that the symptoms added up. The sexual inhibition. The metallic taste. They asked me to do a photofit of the Frenchman, and I knew it was pointless, but showed willing nonetheless. Pointless because I have prosopagnosia. It takes me weeks of repeated exposure to learn a face.

A lucky escape.

Could have been worse.

Not rape. Not death.

I was on beta-blockers at the time, had problems with my heart rate, was being treated for bouts of tachycardia. So I was lucky.

But it’s left its mark. The fact that a man would prefer me unconscious. Remove any chance of fight or flight; remove anything I could use in my defence. Leave me a blank in my life where I was defiled, but I wasn’t present. Where I was defiled, but looked complicit. The fact that I was kind and friendly to a man who didn’t even think of me as human. Just prey, a target. Just a warm object he could pleasure himself with.

This is why I can’t close my eyes to the rape academies. Because now, there are thousands of men doing this to their wives, girlfriends, fiancées, daughters. Women who love them and trust them.

I was lucky. Twice. But luck is not a policy, and love is not a shield. These men need to be tracked down.

Writing is my sole means of support. If you love what I do, but can’t take out a paid subscription right now, you can support me with a like, a comment or a share: all of them tell the algorithm to increase my reach, which makes a big difference. You can also:

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Love reading? Writing is my passion and calling, and readers are my joy. Read double-award-winning novel The Marlowe Papers, Encore Award shortlistee Devotion, or the poetry collections How Things Are on Thursday and Material.

If you’re a paid subscriber, your latest chapter of Why I Stole Your Life is here. Our last EFT session “Tapping into Worthy-Deservingness” is here. We had some great results on the day (which you can replicate if you tap along to the video) and two of the participants have reported reduced physical pain. You can vote on the subject of our May session on that video’s page.

Over to you

This is a tough subject, but one that needs to be talked about. As always, I welcome your comments unless you are a dickhead. Dickheads get blocked.

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Some of them have existed as men.

Infamous 18^th-century pirate Mary Read tells of her previous life as a soldier and wife in this powerful novel by the award-winning author of The Marlowe Papers.

Contents

Port Royal, Jamaica. 18 November 1720.

BOOK 1.

Broxholme, Devon. 1696-97.

London, England. 1697-1705.

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Chapter 1

The Reckon-Pence is Not Money

We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor, and we are preparing for murder.

My father is rolling a barrel of salt-beef towards the loading area. We are making ourselves small behind Mister Lampard’s whelk stall. Mister Lampard is on the dockside letting shouts rain on his head. The shouting man — a captain from his hat — is so red he could burst into flames. He is my father’s captain. Though his words are loud they mean nothing to us.

‘Dutch,’ you whisper.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Look at his shoes.’

There is only one shoe I can see, perched on the rail of the ship like a leather bird. A leather bird with a stockinged leg growing out of it. To me it looks no different than the shoes English captains wear, but because you are a year older than me and many beatings wiser, I trust your eye and begin to see a certain Dutchness in the way the toe curls.

Mister Lampard is pointing at my father and saying something not very polite. I ask you what it means. You know everything, is what I think about you then. That is why I trust you when you say we will have to kill the man who has finished rolling the salt-beef barrel along the dockside: has turned it onto its end.

‘Couldn’t Mister Lampard kill him for us?’ I ask.

His belly hangs over his belt like two loaves-worth of dough, but Mister Lampard used to wrestle for money.

‘It’s not for Mister Lampard to take revenge for Ma,’ you say. ‘If he wasn’t clever about it, he would be hanged.’

‘Won’t we be hanged?’ A boy our age was hanged at the Heavitree gallows for setting fire to a hayrick.

‘We will be clever about it,’ you say. ‘We will make it an accident.’

This is how we will erase the fear on our mother’s face. This is how we will cancel the sin of my making. I always knew I was born out of sin, because sometimes drink would make Ma say so. But I never knew how until yesterday, when she came back from buying the leftover catch tearful, with an empty basket. She said nothing to us, but everything to Mister Lampard, which is the same as to us when we have our ears to the boards. Forced in a dark stairwell, she said. Mister Lampard said there there, not asking for details, but she told him anyway, though what she said wasn’t much: the smell of rum and a knock to the head.

‘How do you know it’s him?’ Mister Lampard asked.

‘The tally tattoo on his arm,’ she said.

That inky five-bar gate we catch a flash of as he stands there, wiping his brow. A tally of ladies knocked on the head, maybe.

‘Will we kill him now?’ I ask.

A laugh huffs from your nostrils.

‘That wouldn’t be clever.’

We watch the man waddle back onto the boat. He has the long-time sailors’ walk, side to side, as if he is still at sea. Mister Lampard stomps back towards us. The Dutch captain is still shouting, throwing his words to land like spit on Mister Lampard’s head. Mister Lampard says,

‘Miserable old ______!’

Whatever the last word means, I am eager to learn it. He follows up with a string of oaths. Then our ears fill with gull-caw and boat-creak, waves slapping the wooden jetty, because Mister Lampard’s got all his anger out.

Later, he’s having supper with us. Whelks in gravy, and the bread Ma baked yesterday, which sticks to the top part of my mouth like a lie. They are talking about reckon-pence. Which is money you pay someone to atone for a sin. Ma is crying.

‘My languages ain’t good enough, Margret,’ says Mister Lampard. ‘I told the Cap-n he should pay for the littlun. I say to him, your man, your man, but he thinks I mean him. So I point at the man who - forgive me, Margret, we all know what he done - and I do a mime.’

It’s true. We saw the mime. Mister Lampard standing on the dockside wobbling his tarriwags like a dog on the butcher’s leg. A laugh burst out of me, I couldn’t stop it, and you might have told me off except one burst out of you too. But then, because Mister Lampard’s mime wasn’t silly enough to stop it being wrong that a sailor hit Ma over the head to make a baby, and we were supposed to be hiding, you made your face serious and nodded at me to be cross again, so I was. Now I check across the table to see if you’re remembering the mime. But you’re scraping a piece of bread around your plate, pushing the gravy into the middle, which means you’re listening very hard and pretending not to. Mister Lampard has Ma’s hand and is filling her ears with words.

‘So I says, keep the blunderbuss on the ship. So he don’t go off on some other woman. But the Cap-n says “All men must drink.” That’s all he says, Margret. “All men must drink.”’

Ma’s tears are falling silently into her lap. She’s looking at her hand in Mister Lampard’s. A mouse in a trap. Curled up soft, like it’s dying in Mister Lampard’s big bed of a hand, his fingers closed over hers.

‘I did what I could,’ he says.

When you’ve mopped up all the gravy, and shoved me your last bit of bread beneath the table, Ma shoos us into the rafters. It’s hot, as if all Ma’s fuss has nested up there like a fluster of pigeons. The mattress feels extra itchy under my shoulder, like some of the straw is poking through but when I complain you say it’s my thoughts that are itchy. You always know my thoughts, as if we really were the twins that strangers take us to be.

‘Does he look like me?’ I say. ‘Do I look like him?’

‘Maybe when he was a scrap he looked like you.’

If he was ever a scrap, he was a bruising scrap, the kind who fights out of his swaddling and punches his Ma on the nose.

‘Do you look like your Da?’ I say, and then I’m sorry, because he’s been a long time at sea and we’re not supposed to talk about him.

‘Ma says so,’ you say with armour in your voice, and I’m doubly sorry. It’s so long since he last went to sea that all we have of him is his name, Read, which all of us wear like a brand of belonging, even if he’s shaken us off, or the sea has shaken him out of his skin. I’ve wondered whether he’s looking down on us all from sailor heaven, which Mister Lampard says is blue skies, a fair wind, and an ocean of rum. But the new story is gnawing at me like a crab on bacon rind.

‘Maybe he didn’t come back because he didn’t believe Ma about the stairwell and the knock on the head,’ I say. ‘He’s at sea, you say,’ in a flat voice that means Don’t you even think anything else.

For a while after that you don’t speak and I wonder if you’ve fallen asleep, though your breathing is noiseless. A shanty starts up in the tavern across the street. I wonder if Mister Lampard is leading it because it’s Maid of Amsterdam but that would be unkind to Ma and anyway I hear him grunting downstairs, like he’s lifting something heavy. More likely it’s down to the Dutch ship being in harbour. When the song gets to the bit where the Great Big Dutchman Rammed My Bow you say,

‘We can’t do anything about my dad, but we can do something about yours.’ You don’t need my nodding in the dark, which is only to soothe the prickly thoughts my head, like a kind of rocking. You are talking more to yourself than anything when you say, ‘I have a plan.’

Only half of me wants to hear this plan of yours. The other half wants to hide under the blanket and muffle you out. But you’re my brother, so I ask you,

‘What?’

There’s a big pause like you didn’t have a plan at all and are thinking it up right on the spot. There’s moonlight coming through the gap in the eaves and I can just see the edge of your face, drawn in silver. You eyes close, and open.

‘We will kill him when he’s drunk.’

You wait as if I am meant to ask how but I am worried about the ‘we’. I have never killed so much as a beetle. I don’t know how not to be part of your ‘we’ because we do mostly everything together, so I ask,

‘What about the reckon-pence?’

You sit up in the dark, like your hair was pulled. You say death is reckon-pence enough. You say everyone who dies gets their reckoning, because of Judgement Day, and best my father gets in line for his sooner before he knocks any more women over the head and makes babies on them. Your plan has made you all twitchy and now you’re out of bed and pulling on your breeches. It looks like I might be excused from your ‘we’ because you’re not asking me to get dressed as well, but I’m still worried about the money. Ma told Mister Lampard to get money off him, because it’s hard to feed two littluns on what she makes from sewing. I’m thinking if she only feeds one it won’t be the one whose father smacked her on the mazzard.

‘But the money,’ I say.

‘She won’t be afraid to walk around Fishtown.’ Tying the cord around your waist. ‘And that’s worth a few bob.’

So it’s decided. You, or maybe we, will kill my father when he’s drunk, and leave God to sort out the reckon-pence.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Scouting. You get some sleep.’

I lie awake for a long time waiting for you to come back but all I hear is mouse-scritch. Outside, the tavern roars and then quiets, roars and then quiets, in waves like the sea itself. In the quiet I hear, high on St Mary’s hill, the murdered-woman shriek of a fox. Voices leave the tavern in clusters of holler and laughter. The fox is done with its horror and quiet gets thick as soup. A lonely song wobbles itself up the street.

Contents Page

In this EFT tapping session, we began with the statement “I deserve to be comfortable and happy.” At the start of the hour, everyone who joined found that only half true. By the end, we were all at 85-90% true. Tap along, take your own start and finish readings, and see how you do. With a little more tapping for homework, can you make it 100%?

P.S. Everyone on the call already knew how to tap so there was no ‘tutorial’. If you’re a complete beginner, best to start with one of the previous video, either Tap into Wealth or Tapping Into Your Best Year Yet.

I’m taking suggestions for the subject of May’s tapping session, so please vote in the poll to let me know what you prefer. The pol…

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D[isaster]-Day

It’s October 2022. The headache is a tight metal band around my skull, tightened on a ratchet. A three-day headache that isn’t abating. My throat is raw as a grazed knee. The best place for me is bed, so that’s where I am when it comes: the message leading to the news that will, for the next few months, destroy me.

Have you seen this article in The Bookseller? It sounds like your book.

There’s a link. Before I’ve even clicked it, I feel sick.

There are no good ways for a friend to rip your heart out. But she had to tell me. She had been there from the book’s inception nearly a decade earlier. She was the reason it existed at all. Every time we’d met for a drink in the intervening years, she’d asked how it was going. Now, with 88 of its planned 92 chapters completed, she was letting me know that its life was hanging in the balance.

A Voice Out of Nowhere

January 2013. I’m off to York for my birthday weekend. We are pulling out of the garage when my phone goes. It’s my friend (and former mentee) Patience Agbabi. Her son has caught a bug, and suddenly, she can’t teach the Arvon workshop she’s due to deliver, starting Monday. In Yorkshire. Can I do it?

What a birthday present! It’s at Lumb Bank, an 18th-century former millhouse once owned by Ted Hughes. I met him as a teenage poet, and he recommended me for an Arvon course; I attended Totleigh Barton in Devon, aged 15, half as young as the next youngest person. To teach for Arvon at his former home is my dream. This is the year in which the universe will shower me with gifts (after some serious manifestation work); in a few months, I will be winning literary prizes and walking on literal red carpets.

“Stop the car!” I say. We are only 50 yards up the road. I run back into the house, pack my favourite writing exercises and extra clothes, grab a few copies of my books, and we’re off! On Sunday night, Paul drives me an hour across snowy hills and drops me at the tutors’ cottage.

It proves to be a memorable and dramatic week. One of the participants doesn’t take his meds, and some drama explodes that brings the rest of us close. But for the purpose of this story, only one thing matters: a book is born. The other tutor, Chris Wakling, and I take part in each other’s workshops. And in his character creation exercise (which I have since adopted), a voice starts talking to me. A young working-class girl from the 18th century.

Since I’m an author, this isn’t a case of upping my meds (I am only on thyroxine) or calling an exorcist. This 18th-century girl isn’t wafting through the 18th-century millhouse in a high-necked nightdress, prickling the hairs on our necks and bemoaning her fate. She’s a feisty, garrulous child, sitting on the steps of a small stone cottage in a Devon fishing village. She’s lippy and lively, and I like her. She tells me how she was born and raised, very much without love, and then we jump to her future, standing at the bow of a ship as it’s coming into port in the Caribbean Sea, with a thin boy half her size, called Gimlet. They’re chatting about how there’s a spot in the water that looks like it’s boiling.

‘Looks like stew,’ I say.

Closer. The boiling is cut through with critter fins. Sharks. The feast is not a stew, not a host of bits, but a single hunk, like a side of goat. Nothing furred, though. Blue-white tangled in black cloth. Flashing crimson when it turns.

‘I wouldn’t like that,’ Gimlet says.

‘Nobody would,’ I say, ‘but they are dead.’

‘I know.’

‘We’re all fish food in the end.’

And with that, the Female Pirate Book is born.

But I am writing Devotion at the time, and shortly after that, pick up my job at Goldsmiths, so it’s parked for the next two years.

Growing the Tale

When I pick it up, I’m vibrating with excitement. I’ve had prizes, but this one, surely, is going to be the book that kicks down the ‘bestseller’ door.

“Who doesn’t love a female pirate?” I say to Paul.

Memorably, he answers, “I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it uncommercial.”

But I have faith. This will be the book. Nevertheless, it takes time to get it off the ground. There are decisions to be made. Research to be done. A fictional female pirate or a real one? I read up on them all, across several centuries, and eventually follow my instincts to choose Mary Read. The only female pirate who didn’t get into piracy through a man (as daughter or girlfriend or wife). Her life is full and fascinating: she’s a footman, a soldier, and a tavernkeeper before she gets a sniff of a life at sea. She passes as male for almost all of her life: how on earth does that work, at close quarters, in bunkrooms and tents? How does she deal with periods, for example?

But she has her own concerns, and once I’ve refound her voice, an awful lot to say. She wants me to know how she became a pirate. Seems she’s determined to explain that it wasn’t her fault, hardly even her choice. It’s the outcome of circumstances, and a series of decisions, and she’s darn well going to educate me (and her imagined reader) on all of them. And this is how the book becomes the epic adventure of her life, from near-cradle to standing on the gallows, looking at a noose.

Writing has to happen around earning a living, and sometimes that knocks the book to bed for months at a time. The university year leads to months full of marking, and for three years I work a second job to make ends meet. Each time I stop, it takes two or three weeks to re-enter the world of the story and get back up to speed.

Frustrated with how long it’s taking I decide it’s time to stop writing like a poet: I must smash up my practice, really throw myself fully into ‘shitty first draft’. By this time, I know the book’s in three parts, and I write the whole of Part 2, her soldiering life, in this speedier way, thinking I’ll fix it in the edit. A conversation with my colleague Francis Spufford at the launch of his first novel, Golden Hill, makes me realise the storyline has gone unfixably wrong. All 40,000 words of Part 2 must be trashed. I start again, and more slowly. Like it or not, I’m a tortoise, not a hare.

Other things that slow me down: so much research. Military history books are the worst; they send me to sleep before I can read three pages. And all they tell me is the birds’ eye view of the generals, not the soldiers on the ground. (Should have read War and Peace! I am reading it now, thanks to .) Eventually, I find some first-hand accounts from the battles I’ve chosen she’ll fight in. (Documented details for this part of her life don’t exist.)

Then we get to sea, and OH the stuff I have to learn! And then how to ‘wear it lightly’ this research. And still there is so much story. She has so much to say.

And then 2020 happens, and a week before lockdown, I catch Covid. No tests then, but I’m very, very ill. I don’t know why I’m not getting better, several weeks in, why I have to sit down and take a break after walking about two hundred yards. The brain fog and fatigue. Long Covid is my companion for the rest of the year. The three or four hours of screen time I can manage per day is spent teaching remotely, and converting my in-person university modules to work online. I don’t write the book for almost a year.

In the second half of 2022, there is no more research. Every element of the story is in place, and finally, we are accelerating towards the finish line. In October, I’m four chapters from the end when I catch Covid again. And then my phone goes ping.

The Other Book

When I click the link, everything I’d dreamed for my book collapses into dust. Bloomsbury has bought, in a six-figure deal, a novel about the pirate Mary Read. Everything they say about it sounds like mine. Compelling. Poetic.

The sound that comes out is a howl. The sheer horror propels me out of bed, but I don’t get far, I collapse to my knees. Paul comes in to find out what’s happened and at first, I can’t even find words. I know what this means. I’m destroyed.

I email my agent with the terrible news and ask her opinion. She agrees it’s a disaster. The only chance we have, she says, is to try to beat the other book to publication. Which has already been announced for 18 months. With trad publishing turnarounds, we have to be swift.

“How quickly can you finish it?” she asks.

“If I push really hard, put all else aside, four weeks. But the second half will be in a first draft state, I’ll need time to edit.”

“Get it to me in four weeks,” she says, “sooner if you can.”

So with my head still pounding and my fever still high, I go down to my basement study and begin. And when I’m not writing, I’ll be honest, I’m mostly weeping. I’m furious with myself for taking so long. I want to tear myself to pieces. I’m shocked at how deeply it throws me back into old ways of feeling, twenty years before, when I hated myself.

Paul says, “Perhaps this has happened because it’s more important that you do this personal growth work than that the book gets published”, and it’s really not the time.

In four weeks, I write THE END and send it to my agent.

“It’s longer than you said,” she says.

I know. This is one of the reasons it’s taken as long as it has. Big characters. Big story. But I’ve armed myself with long book stats, all the great books it’s shorter than.

“The market’s changed,” she says. “Per page printing costs are much higher since Brexit.” As if the other book wasn’t problem enough, we have an issue with size.

I tell her, “Please try.”

My previous publisher holds an ‘option’, so they get first refusal.

“Do tell Juliet that I know the second half needs work,” I said. “Let her know I know it’s a first draft, and I’m working on the edit.”

Four weeks later, just before Christmas, a No.

“Did you tell her that I know the second half needs work?”

She admits she didn’t. “I didn’t want to talk it down.”

I feel like screaming. Not just with her, but with the whole situation. And most of all, at myself for being the slowest, stupidest writer in Christendom. Who knew I had balanced so much of my self-regard on the fate of this book? Not me.

“Why Don’t You Self-Publish?”

By April, my agent had gathered a whole bunch of ‘No’s. It was now 12 months until the other book’s publication, and I was desperate to beat it to the punch. So desperate that, at my agent’s suggestion, I decided to do what I’d already publicly (and notoriously, in The Guardian) said I wouldn’t do: self-publish.

Not because there’s anything wrong with doing that (I had published non-fiction when I wrote that piece), but because it’s hard for literary fiction to find readers that way, and what I want is readers. Unless you’re a marketing genius (and you love that kind of thing) or you really don’t care how many copies you sell, self-publishing is the hardest route of all.

Part 3 still wasn’t sufficiently revised, but Part 1 was good to go, so I decided this: split it into three books. Publish them six months apart, and the third should coincide (just about) with The Other Book.

Well, long story short, what a shit show. Of course it was. Hadn’t I predicted this wasn’t for me? Oh boy, how it wasn’t. This part deserves a whole piece of its own, so for now, I will skip to the end. The few people who read Nothing Becoming really loved it, but (even though I gave it an extra chapter to end it) it very clearly wasn’t complete. By the end, she’s about to join the army, and past the prologue, there’s barely a sniff of the sea. A great deal of effort, and a lot of borrowed money later, I’d achieved nothing but sufficient stress to make me ill.

My Champion Appears

At someone else’s book launch, an agent who had been sort of ‘courting me’ for the previous six months gives me the hard truth I need to hear.

There’s no way I can ‘beat’ the other book.

I sign with him in September 2023. His advice? Unpublish Nothing Becoming, “drop it in a memory hole,” and put the epic adventure back together. I meet him in the British Library to hand over, in a carrier bag, the printed-out rest of the book so he can make notes on it (he’s very old-school). At one point while reading, he sends me this email:

I am well on now and loving every page I’m reading and as I read (well into Mary’s life at sea now), the more I am awestruck with admiration for the level of your achievement. It’s monumental and brilliant, and more importantly works on a totally human level that speaks to the reader person to person.

The biggest marvel of the book, apart from its size and scope, is its voice--the voice of Mary--and the conversation it sets up with the reader all along the way, bringing in so much observation and commentary that allows us recognise our world, our values, our potentials and failures in hers.

I am concluding the novel is a Booker shortlist--even Booker-winning--level work of (hesitates to use the word, for seldom is it deployed) genius. It combines research with a level of imaginative power and authority that I find breathtaking as I read.

At last, the book has a champion.

The Market

Once I get to my quieter term, in January 2024, I begin a mammoth edit. By July, it is still very long, but restructured and cleaner. After a two-month read, my agent bounces it back with a few more changes, which are done by the end of the year.

In 2025, he starts making quiet enquiries. He’s well-connected in the business, but sadly, that isn’t enough. What do we learn? Well, the Other Book is no longer perceived as a problem, but others exist.

• The market is risk-averse.

• The book is very big, and I am not.

• I do not have a million followers on Instagram or TikTok.

• I do not (yet) have 30,000 Substack subscribers

• Thin books are in.

• Japanese and Korean translations are in.

• Young authors are in.

We have had to conclude this is not yet our time. This book may one day find itself between physical covers, but that will only happen if I can grow an audience sufficient to make that economically viable. So this is, perhaps, where you (and any reader friends you have) might come in.

As announced last week, I am serialising the novel, Dickens-style, on this Substack, every Tuesday. Paid subscribers are a week ahead and should have received this: free subscribers will get the first chapter in their inboxes next week. The whole book will be accessible here.

That feisty young girl who materialised at Ted Hughes’ old house 13 years ago, sitting on her cottage steps, has waited long enough to be heard. She has a great deal to say. This wild adventure is not yet at the end, and both of us, me and her, are putting our faith in you helping us to some kind of happy ending.

Below the paywall for paid subscribers: a compact extra. How I manifested this unpleasant experience (yes, I own it) and how you can avoid doing the same!

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